Discrete Applied Mathematics 98 (1999) 1{19 On some properties of DNA graphs

Molecular biology which aims to study DNA and protein structure and functions, has stimu-lated research in dierent scientic disciplines, discrete mathematics being one of them. One of the problems considered is that of recognition of DNA primary structure. It is known that some methods for solving this problem may be reduced (in their computational part) to graph-theoretic problems involving labeled graphs. Each vertex in such graphs has a label of length k written with an alphabet of size , where k and are two parameters. This paper is concerned with studying properties of these graphs (referred to as DNA graphs). More precisely, we give recog-nition algorithms and compare graphs labeled with dierent values of k and .? 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved