Bayer Healthcare LLC

Stephen Darasch

Alexandre M Izmailov

Henryk Zaleski

In order to align DNA sequence data traces, an experimental data trace representing the positions of a first species of base within a target polynucleotide and a reference data trace representing the positions of a second species of base (which may be the same as or different from the first species) within a reference polynucleotide are obtained by separating appropriate sequencing fragments generated from the target and reference polynucleotides on an electrophoresis gel. For each reference data trace, a plurality of peaks corresponding to fragments having a size in the range of 40 to 1200 bases are selected. A base number is assigned to each of the selected peaks in the reference data trace, and a numerical &ldquo;peak file&rdquo; is created with information about the peak number and migration time (or distance). This peak file is analyzed to determine a set of polynomial coefficients which will allow substantial linearization of a plot of peak number versus separation between adjacent peaks and alignment of the traces with respect to each other. These coefficients are used to create a corrected time scale identifying where peaks should be located on a given experimental gel. This corrected time scale is used to guide the sampling of the experimental data, and for assignment of peaks within the data.

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Toronto, Canada

Stephen Darasch