AStarix: Fast and Optimal Sequence-to-Graph Alignment

We present an algorithm for the optimal alignment of sequences to genome graphs. It works by phrasing the edit distance minimization task as finding a shortest path on an implicit alignment graph. To find a shortest path, we instantiate the A\(^\star \) paradigm with a novel domain-specific heuristic function that accounts for the upcoming subsequence in the query to be aligned, resulting in a provably optimal alignment algorithm called AStarix.