A New Approach to Pattern Matching in Degenerate DNA/RNA Sequences and Distributed Pattern Matching

. In this paper, we consider the pattern matching problem in DNA and RNA sequences where either the pattern or the text can be degenerate , i.e., contain sets of characters . We present an asymptotically faster algorithm for the above problem that works in O ( n log m ) time, where n and m is the length of the text and the pattern respectively. We also suggest an efficient implementation of our algorithm, which works in linear time when the pattern size is small. Finally, we also describe how our approach can be used to solve the distributed pattern matching problem.