Burrows-Wheeler Transform

What is the Burrows-Wheeler Transform?

The Burrows-Wheeler Transform (BWT) is a data transformation algorithm that restructures data in a way that makes it more compressible. It is a key component of the bzip2 data compression algorithm.

Motivation

The BWT was originally developed to improve the performance of short read mapping algorithms used in genome sequencing. These algorithms attempt to align short reads of DNA sequence to a reference genome. The BWT can be used to transform the reference genome in a way that makes it much faster to find matches for short reads.

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