3GOLD

Third-generation sequencing offers some advantages over its next-generation sequencing predecessor, with the caveat of harboring a much higher error rate. Accordingly, clustering related sequences has become an essential task in modern biology. In order to accurately cluster sequences rich in errors, error type and frequency need to be accounted for. Levenshtein distance is a well-established mathematical algorithm for measuring edit distance between words and can specifically weight insertions, deletions and substitutions. However, there are drawbacks to using Levenshtein distance in a biological context, and hence, it has rarely been used for this purpose. 3GOLD is a novel modification to the Levenshtein distance algorithm for clustering error-rich biological sequencing data.