In collaboration with the Broad Institute, the goal of this 2016 precision medicine contest was to find an algorithm that aligned multiple DNA sequences to a reference DNA for a simpler case. The reference DNA and the DNA from which the sequences originated had only minor differences. The task was to align these sequences fast and accurately, and test the alignment position for possible redundancies (see the problem statement).
Ninety-six participants competed for $20,000 and submitted 410 solutions. The winning algorithm was at least 14 times faster on the full-size test than the current state of the art algorithm, BWA, with a comparable level of accuracy. Additionally, the time of alignment of about 10 million read pairs against the entire genome was reduced from two hours to 8 minutes. Learn more about the results here.
