Multiple sequence alignment
Revision as of 15:44, 17 February 2011 by Joel Hedlund (NSC) (talk | contribs) (Created page with "The purpose of [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_sequence_alignment multiple sequence alignment] is to match up a number of related biological sequences against one another ...")
The purpose of multiple sequence alignment is to match up a number of related biological sequences against one another as well as possible, so that in each position in the resulting alignment, all residues play the exact same biological role in the original sequences. This is done by moving and stretching the sequences as necessary to achieve the optimal fit. This is essentially a multidimensional optimisation problem with a large solution space, so clever heuristics are needed in order to make the problem tractable. Many algorithms have been proposed for solving this with maximal efficiency, and there is often a tradeoff between quality on one hand, and speed and slim resource requirements on the other.
Examples include:
- ClustalW
- mafft
- Muscle
- Praline
- T-Coffee
