Question
Minimizers serve as seeds in this task. For 10 points each:
[10m] Name this task of comparing sequence data that is performed by the Needleman–Wunsch algorithm. NCBI's BLAST server performs this task in order to find matches between genetic databases and a user's query reads.
ANSWER: sequence alignment [accept aligning sequences; prompt on sequence mapping]
[10e] Sequence alignment is central to a field named for "bio-[this word]." This word is the "I" in "I·T" and names a "theory" pioneered by Claude Shannon.
ANSWER: information [or bioinformatics or informatics]
[10h] Reads are summarized with examples of these constructs called minimizers. The namesake quantity of these overlapping uniform-length substrings of sequences, which are the bioinformatic analog of n-grams, is set to 31 for humans.
ANSWER: k-mers
<Science - Other Science - Computer Science>
Data
Summary
| Tournament | Edition | Exact Match? | Heard | PPB | Easy % | Medium % | Hard % |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2025 PACE NSC | 06/07/2025 | Y | 42 | 10.00 | 88% | 10% | 2% |