Exact asymptotic results for the Bernoulli matching model of sequence alignment

Finding analytically the statistics of the longest common subsequence (LCS) of a pair of random sequences drawn from c alphabets is a challenging problem in computational evolutionary biology. We present exact asymptotic results for the distribution of the LCS in a simpler, yet nontrivial, variant of the original model called the Bernoulli matching (BM) model. We show that in the BM model, for all c , the distribution of the asymptotic length of the LCS, suitably scaled, is identical to the Tracy-Widom distribution of the largest eigenvalue of a random matrix whose entries are drawn from a Gaussian unitary ensemble.