A construction of pooling designs with some happy surprises

J Comput Biol. 2005 Oct;12(8):1129-36. doi: 10.1089/cmb.2005.12.1129.

Abstract

The screening of data sets for "positive data objects" is essential to modern technology. A (group) test that indicates whether a positive data object is in a specific subset or pool of the dataset can greatly facilitate the identification of all the positive data objects. A collection of tested pools is called a pooling design. Pooling designs are standard experimental tools in many biotechnical applications. In this paper, we use the (linear) subspace relation coupled with the general concept of a "containment matrix" to construct pooling designs with surprisingly high degrees of error correction (detection.) Error-correcting pooling designs are important to biotechnical applications where error rates often are as high as 15%. What is also surprising is that the rank of the pooling design containment matrix is independent of the number of positive data objects in the dataset.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't
  • Research Support, U.S. Gov't, Non-P.H.S.

MeSH terms

  • Computational Biology / methods*
  • DNA / analysis*
  • DNA Probes
  • Genomic Library*
  • Humans
  • Mathematics
  • Models, Theoretical

Substances

  • DNA Probes
  • DNA