Mapping short reads to a genomic sequence with circular structure

The constant advances in sequencing technology are turning whole-genome sequencing into a routine procedure, resulting in massive amounts of data that need to be processed. Tens of gigabytes of data in the form of short reads need to be mapped back to reference sequences, a few gigabases long. These high-throughput (or next-generation) technologies allow researchers to characterise a bacterial genome during a single experiment and at a moderate cost. In this paper, as most of the bacteria have a single circular chromosome, we present a simple, yet efficient, accurate and consistent algorithm, to solve the practical problem of matching millions of short reads to a genomic sequence with circular structure.