Calculate the Hamming Distance between two DNA strands.
Your body is made up of cells that contain DNA. Those cells regularly wear out and need replacing, which they achieve by dividing into daughter cells. In fact, the average human body experiences about 10 quadrillion cell divisions in a lifetime!
When cells divide, their DNA replicates too. Sometimes during this process mistakes happen and single pieces of DNA get encoded with the incorrect information. If we compare two strands of DNA and count the differences between them we can see how many mistakes occurred. This is known as the "Hamming Distance".
We read DNA using the letters C,A,G and T. Two strands might look like this:
GAGCCTACTAACGGGAT
CATCGTAATGACGGCCT
^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^^
They have 7 differences, and therefore the Hamming Distance is 7.
The Hamming Distance is useful for lots of things in science, not just biology, so it's a nice phrase to be familiar with :)
The Hamming distance is only defined for sequences of equal length, so an attempt to calculate it between sequences of different lengths should not work. The general handling of this situation (e.g., raising an exception vs returning a special value) may differ between languages.
Refer to the exercism help page for Rust installation and learning resources.
Execute the tests with:
$ cargo testAll but the first test have been ignored. After you get the first test to
pass, open the tests source file which is located in the tests directory
and remove the #[ignore] flag from the next test and get the tests to pass
again. Each separate test is a function with #[test] flag above it.
Continue, until you pass every test.
If you wish to run all ignored tests without editing the tests source file, use:
$ cargo test -- --ignoredTo run a specific test, for example some_test, you can use:
$ cargo test some_testIf the specific test is ignored use:
$ cargo test some_test -- --ignoredTo learn more about Rust tests refer to the online test documentation
Make sure to read the Modules chapter if you haven't already, it will help you with organizing your files.
After you have solved the exercise, please consider using the additional utilities, described in the installation guide, to further refine your final solution.
To format your solution, inside the solution directory use
cargo fmtTo see, if your solution contains some common ineffective use cases, inside the solution directory use
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The Calculating Point Mutations problem at Rosalind http://rosalind.info/problems/hamm/
It's possible to submit an incomplete solution so you can see how others have completed the exercise.