Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Patterns In Words Related To Dna Rearrangements, Lukas Nabergall

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Patterns, sequences of variables, have traditionally only been studied when morphic images of them appear as factors in words. In this thesis, we initiate a study of patterns in words that appear as subwords of words. We say that a pattern appears in a word if each pattern variable can be morphically mapped to a factor in the word. To gain insight into the complexity of, and similarities between, words, we define pattern indices and distances between two words relative a given set of patterns. The distance is defined as the minimum number of pattern insertions and/or removals that transform …