Matching information terminal based on a spatially coded moire technique

We report on the construction of a matching information terminal based on a spatially coded moire technique, to be used as visualization equipment for genome analysis. The terminal provides the result of a string matching ope ration, which is achieved by overlapping of spatially coded patterns with a small intersection angle to generate moire fringes. The fringes reveal the matching between two string sequences coded as spatial patterns. Due to it s flexibility in image display, the matching information terminal is able t o deal with long strings such as a gene sequence. The constructed terminal achieves string matching for 256 bases of DNA sequences and displays about 25,000 point-to-point matching results at a time. (C) 2001 society of Photo -optical Instrumentation Engineers.