Phage typing sets (Q1200877)

Epidemiological testing requires fast, accurate and economical techniques. Phage typing is one such technique. Most of the raw data needed for phage testing must be gathered by lots of manual labor without computer assistance. The data that is collected has a random nature and is typically voluminous enough that it is difficult for humans to spot key patterns. The high data processing speed of the computer can organize the data and make the final test as efficient and economical as possible. Section 2 of this paper describes the importance of phage typing, briefly describes how the raw data for a phage typing set is collected, and explains why it is important to make a phage typing set as small as possible. Section 3 describes how the computer can be used to find small phage typing sets. Section 4 briefly describes NP-complete and NP-hard problems and the relevance of such problems to the problem of finding small phage typing sets. Section 5 describes the programs that we have developed to find small phage typing sets and shows why a high speed computer is a valuable asset in the search for small phage typing sets.