Progressive multiple sequence alignments from triplets

Motivation: The quality of progressive sequence alignments strongly depends on the accuracy of the individual pairwise alignment steps since gaps that are introduced at one step cannot be removed at later aggregation steps. Adjacent insertions and deletions necessarily appear in arbitrary order in pairwise alignments and hence form an unavoidable source of errors. Idea: Here we present a modified variant of progressive sequence alignments that addresses both issues. Instead of pairwise alignments we use exact dynamic programming to align sequence or profile triples. This avoids a large fractions of the ambiguities arising in pairwise alignments. In the subsequent aggregation steps we follow the logic of the Neighbor-Net algorithm, which constructs a phylogenetic network by step-wisely replacing triples by pairs instead of combining pairs to singletons. To this end the three-way alignments are subdivided into two partial alignments, at which stage all-gap columns are naturally remove...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2007
• Where: BMCBI
• Authors: Matthias Kruspe, Peter F. Stadler
• Keywords: BMCBI 2007, Individual Pairwise Alignment, Pairwise Alignments, Progressive Sequence Alignments