Mike Wallinga Author

Editorial Open Access

Quasi-Optimal Multiple Sequence Alignments

Author(s):

Quoc-Nam Tran, Mike Wallinga

Finding an optimal multiple sequence alignment (MSA) of three or more nucleic acid or amino acid sequences is a fundamental problem of bioinformatics with a large number of publications and citations over the last 30 years. Given a set of sequences, an optimal MSA identifies homologous characters, which have common ancestry. The resulting MSA is used for many downstream applications in medical and health informatics such as constructing phylogenetic trees, finding protein families, predicting secondary and tertiary structure of new sequences, and demonstrating the homology between new sequences and existing families. Unfortunately, techniques that work well for pairwise alignment often become too computationally expensive when they are applied to multiple sequence alignment due the extr... view more»

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