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AI Features

Feature #4: Identifying Proteins

Explore how to determine if a genome sequence is a palindrome, a key step in identifying potential new proteins. This lesson teaches you to apply a recursive approach to compare sequence characters, helping you understand problem-solving in computational biology relevant to coding interviews.

Description

We have an unknown sequence of genomes that is thought to be a new protein. To accept or reject this sequence as a new protein, one method we can use is to identify it as a palindromic sequence. A palindrome is a string that reads the same from the start as the end.

We’ll be provided with a sequence of genomes in the form of a string. Our task is to identify whether these genomes constitute a palindrome to be considered as a potential protein.

Solution

A recursive approach can be used to solve this problem. We can keep comparing the first and last elements of the string. If these values are equal, then the updated string, with the matched entries removed, can be sent to the recursive function.

Let’s see how we might implement this functionality:

  1. Define the following base case:

    • If the given sequence has a length equal to zero or one, it will
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