To study evolution on the genetic level across a wide range of organisms, biologists need accurate tools for multiple sequence alignment of protein families. Given a set of biological sequences, a multiple alignment provides biologists with a way of identifying and visualizing patterns of sequence conservation, advancing both evolutionary and phylogenetic studies. Protein alignments in particul...

While the area of sequence comparison has a rich collection of results on the alignment of two sequences, and even the alignment of multiple sequences, there is little known about the alignment of two alignments. The problem becomes interesting when the alignment objective function counts gaps, as is common when aligning biological sequences, and has the form of the sum-of-pairs objective. We b...

A program is described for simultaneously aligning two or more molecular sequences which is based on first finding common segments above a specified length and then piecing these together to maximize an alignment scoring function. Optimal as well as near-optimal alignments are found, and there is also provided a means for randomizing the given sequences for testing the statistical significance ...