With the large amount of genomic DNA sequence data being made available, it is becoming more important to find genes (parts of the genomic DNA which are responsible for the synthesis of proteins) in these sequences. It is known that for eukaryotes (in contrast to prokaryotes) the process is more complicated, because of the presence of junk DNA that interrupts the coding region of genes in the genomic sequence. That is, a gene is composed by several pieces (called exons) of coding regions. It is known that the order of the exons is maintained in the protein synthesis process, but the number of exons and their lengths can be arbitrary.
Most gene finding algorithms have two steps: in the first they search for possible exons; in the second they try to assemble a largest possible gene, by finding a chain with the largest possible number of exons. This chain must obey the order in which the exons appear in the genomic sequence. We say that exon i appears before exon j if the end of i precedes the beginning of j. The objective of this problem is, given a set of possible exons, to find the chain with the largest possible number of exons that cound be assembled to generate a gene.