Lightweight LCP construction for next-generation sequencing datasets

The advent of "next-generation" DNA sequencing (NGS) technologies has meant that collections of hundreds of millions of DNA sequences are now commonplace in bioinformatics. Knowing the longest common prefix array (LCP) of such a collection would facilitate the rapid computation of maximal exact matches, shortest unique substrings and shortest absent words. CPU-efficient algorithms for computing the LCP of a string have been described in the literature, but require the presence in RAM of large data structures. This prevents such methods from being feasible for NGS datasets. In this paper we propose the first lightweight method that simultaneously computes, via sequential scans, the LCP and BWT of very large collections of sequences. Computational results on collections as large as 800 million 100-mers demonstrate that our algorithm scales to the vast sequence collections encountered in human whole genome sequencing experiments.