Abstract
Finding shortest unique substrings (SUS) is a fundamental problem in string processing with applications in bioinformatics. In this paper, we present an algorithm for solving a variant of the SUS problem, the left-bounded shortest unique substrings (LSUS). This variant is particularly important in applications such as PCR primer design. Our algorithm runs in O(n) time using 2n memory words plus n bytes for an input string of length n. Experimental results with real and artificial datasets show that our algorithm is the fastest alternative in practice, being two times faster (on the average) than related works, while using a similar peak memory footprint.