Group Testing Problems in Experimental Molecular Biology

Introduction In group testing, the task is to determine the distinguished members of a set of objects L by asking subset queries of the form "does the set Q ` L contain a distinguished object?" The primary biological application of group testing is for screening libraries of clones with hybridization probes [1, 2]. This is a crucial step in constructing physical maps and for finding genes. Group testing has also been considered for sequencing by hybridization [12]. Another important application includes screening libraries of reagents for useful chemically active zones. In the literature on biological screening, the subset Q which is used in a query is called a pool . The process of asking the query is referred to as testing or screening the pool with a probe. "Yes" answers and "No" answers are positive and negative results re