摘要
The focus of this paper is the frequent gene team problem. Given a quorum parameter μ and a set of m genomes, the problem is to find gene teams that occur in at least μ of the given genomes. In this paper, a new algorithm is presented. Previous solutions are efficient only when μ is small. Unlike previous solutions, the presented algorithm does not rely on examining every combination of μ genomes. Its time complexity is independent of μ. Under some realistic assumptions, the practical running time is estimated to be O(m^{2}n^{2}; {mathrm{lg}};n) , where n is the maximum length of the input genomes. Experiments showed that the presented algorithm is extremely efficient. For any μ, it takes less than 1 second to process 100 bacterial genomes and takes only 10 minutes to process 2,000 genomes. The presented algorithm can be used as an effective tool for large scale genome analyses.