How to measure DNA similarity with Python and Dynamic Programming
*Note, if you want to skip the background / alignment calculations and go straight to where the code begins, just click here. Dynamic Programming and DNA Dynamic programming has many uses, including identifying the similarity between two different strands of DNA or RNA, protein alignment, and in various other applications in bioinformatics (in addition to many other fields). For anyone less familiar, dynamic programming is a coding paradigm that solves recursive problems by breaking them down into sub-problems using some type of data structure to store the sub-problem results. In this way, recursive problems (like the Fibonacci sequence for example) can be programmed much more efficiently because dynamic programming allows you to avoid duplicate (and hence, wasteful) calculations in your code. Click here to read more about dynamic programming. Let's…
