On the recognition of de Bruijn graphs and their induced subgraphs Original Research Article

The directed de Bruijn graphs appear often as models in computer science, because of the useful properties these graphs have. Similarly, the induced subgraphs of these graphs have applications related to the sequencing of DNA chains. In this paper, we show that the directed de Bruijn graphs can be recognized in polynomial time. We also show that it is possible to recognize in polynomial time whether a given directed graph is an induced subgraph of some directed de Bruijn graph with given size of the labels. This result answers a question raised in a previous paper studying the properties of these induced subgraphs.