Variable Neighborhood Search as Genetic Algorithm Operator for DNA Fragment Assembling Problem

Many specific algorithms and metaheuristics have been proposed for solving the DNA fragment assembly problem, but new algorithms with more capacity for solving this problem are necessary. The fragment assembly problem consists in building the DNA sequence from several hundreds (or even, thousands) of fragments obtained by biologists in the laboratory. This is an important task in any genome project since the rest of the phases depend on the accuracy of the results of this stage. In order to achieve this objective we propose a hybrid algorithm that achieves very accurate results in comparison with other metaheuristics.