Source Coding Scheme for Multiple Sequence Alignments

Rapid development of DNA sequencing technologies exponentially increases the amount of publicly available genomic data. Whole genome multiple sequence alignments represent a particularly voluminous, frequently downloaded static dataset. In this work we propose an asymmetric source coding scheme for such alignments using evolutionary prediction in combination with lossless black and white image compression. Compared to the Lempel-Ziv algorithm used so far the compression rates are almost halved.