FM-index of alignment: A compressed index for similar strings

In this paper we propose the FM-index of alignment, a compressed index for similar strings with the functionalities of pattern search and random access. For this, we first design a new and improved version of the suffix array of alignment. The FM-index of alignment is an FM-index of this suffix array of alignment. The FM-index of alignment supports the LF-mapping and backward search, the key functionalities of the FM-index, but the LF-mapping and backward search of our index is significantly more involved than the original FM-index. We implemented the FM-index of alignment and did experiments on 100 genome sequences from the 1000 Genomes Project. The index size of the FM-index of alignment is about a half of that of RLCSA due to Mäkinen et al.