High performance DNA sequencer for early stage HIV detection

Abstract

DNA sequence alignment aims to search for regions of homology between biological sequences bycomparing DNAnucleotides (Adenine, Cytosine, Guanine and Thymine) of an unknown (query) sequence against reference sequences in a database. From biological point of views, any reference sequence with the highest scores has the closest relationship with the query sequence, thus characteristics of the unknown sequence could be inferred by referring to the characteristics of the matched reference sequence. However, the execution of DNA/protein sequencing on standard desktop computers, produces results in hours or even days especially when dealing with longer sequences and large database. Therefore a real time systolic array-based DNA sequencer, specifically designed for HIV detection is developed.