Introduction to multiple sequence alignment
Last updated
Last updated
In this section we will focus on the computational challenges that arise from trying to relate to each other more than two biological strings. We ask several questions. How do we determine the relationship between multiple protein sequences that have been shown to perform the same biological function? Such a question can be addressed as an extension of global sequence alignment (see Inexact alignment) that can handle multiple sequences, i.e., a global multiple sequence alignment. How do we determine the signals hidden in the upstream region of genes that determine the timing and order in which genes are turned on or off? This is a variant of local multiple sequence alignment (since we are only interested in a small segment of the upstream region of genes), and can be solved through . How do we find the relationship between multiple similar genome sequences? This multiple genome alignment problem has similarities to global multiple sequence alignment, but is substantially more complex given the much longer sequences involved and the potential for large amount of differences between them.