Instructions

Test suite

Solution

Note:

This solution was written on an old version of Exercism. The tests below might not correspond to the solution code, and the exercise may have changed since this code was written.

Calculate the Hamming difference between two DNA strands.

A mutation is simply a mistake that occurs during the creation or copying of a nucleic acid, in particular DNA. Because nucleic acids are vital to cellular functions, mutations tend to cause a ripple effect throughout the cell. Although mutations are technically mistakes, a very rare mutation may equip the cell with a beneficial attribute. In fact, the macro effects of evolution are attributable by the accumulated result of beneficial microscopic mutations over many generations.

The simplest and most common type of nucleic acid mutation is a point mutation, which replaces one base with another at a single nucleotide.

By counting the number of differences between two homologous DNA strands taken from different genomes with a common ancestor, we get a measure of the minimum number of point mutations that could have occurred on the evolutionary path between the two strands.

This is called the 'Hamming distance'.

It is found by comparing two DNA strands and counting how many of the nucleotides are different from their equivalent in the other string.

GAGCCTACTAACGGGAT
CATCGTAATGACGGCCT
^ ^ ^  ^ ^    ^^

The Hamming distance between these two DNA strands is 7.

Implementation notes

The Hamming distance is only defined for sequences of equal length. This means that based on the definition, each language could deal with getting sequences of equal length differently.

Source

The Calculating Point Mutations problem at Rosalind http://rosalind.info/problems/hamm/

Submitting Incomplete Solutions

It's possible to submit an incomplete solution so you can see how others have completed the exercise.

hamming-test.scm

;; Load SRFI-64 lightweight testing specification
(use-modules (srfi srfi-64))

;; Suppress log file output. To write logs, comment out the following line:
(module-define! (resolve-module '(srfi srfi-64)) 'test-log-to-file #f)

(add-to-load-path (dirname (current-filename)))
(use-modules (hamming))

(test-begin "hamming")

(test-eqv "no-difference-between-empty-strands"
          0
          (hamming-distance "" ""))

(test-eqv "no-difference-between-identical-strands"
          0
          (hamming-distance "GATTACA" "GATTACA"))

(test-eqv "complete-hamming-distance-in-small-strand"
          3
          (hamming-distance "ACT" "GGA"))

(test-eqv "small-hamming-distance-in-middle-somewhere"
          1
          (hamming-distance "GGACG" "GGTCG"))

(test-eqv "larger-difference"
          2
          (hamming-distance "ACCAGGG" "ACTATGG"))

(test-error "invalid-to-get-distance-for-different-length-strings"
         #t
         (hamming-distance "AGACAACAGCCAGCCGCCGGATT" "AGGCAA"))


(test-end "hamming")

(define-module (hamming)
  #:export (hamming-distance))

(define (compare-list sq1-list sq2-list)
  (if (not (null? sq1-list))
    (if (not (eq? (car sq1-list) (car sq2-list)))
      (+ 1 (compare-list (cdr sq1-list) (cdr sq2-list)))
      (compare-list (cdr sq1-list) (cdr sq2-list))
      )
    0
    )
  )
   
(define (hamming-distance sq1 sq2)
  (define sq1-list (string->list sq1))
  (define sq2-list (string->list sq2))
  (if (eq? (length sq1-list) (length sq2-list))
    (compare-list sq1-list sq2-list)
    (throw 'lists-inequal)
    )
  )

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craigmaloney's solution

to Hamming in the Scheme Track