Programmable Hardware Based Short Read Aligner Using Phred Quality Scores

Smith Waterman Algorithm is a widely used tool in bioinformatics. It aligns reads to a reference in whole genome sequencing. Mapping millions of sequences reads to a reference is a computationally expensive operation. Here, accuracy and performance are two important aspects of the process. Therefore, FPGA based solutions are widely used for this problem. In this study, we try to achieve a better mapping accuracy to achieve optimum alignment using Phred Quality scores of the bases of read sequences while keeping the performance high. We offer a new Smith Waterman processing unit and systolic array based on quality scores.