This paper presents a Web-based environment for visualising and manipulating multiple ontology alignments at schema-level. While most solutions are limited to the visualisation of single alignments and are still provided as part of specific standalone matching systems, we propose an open environment that is not bound to any specific system. Within this graphical environment, users can manually ...

Direct optimization frameworks for simultaneously estimating alignments and phylogenies have recently been developed. One such method, implemented in the program POY, is becoming more common for analyses of variable length sequences (e.g., analyses using ribosomal genes) and for combined evidence analyses (morphology + multiple genes). Simulation of sequences containing insertion and deletion e...

In contrast to proteins, many classes of functionally related RNA molecules show a rather weak sequence conservation but instead a fairly well conserved secondary structure. Hence it is clear, that any method that relates RNA sequences in form of (multiple) alignments should take structural features into account. Since multiple alignments are of great importance for subsequent data analysis, re...

Introduction The explosion in biological sequence information has led to the generation of large multiple sequence alignments (MSA). For example, the biggest protein family alignment currently in the Pfam database (Wellcome Trust-Sanger Institute) has over 288,000 sequences1. A new generation of alignment programs, such as Clustal Omega2, are available that allow the routine calculation of such...

A basic computational problem that arises in both the construction and local-search phases of the best heuristics for multiple sequence alignment is that of aligning the columns of two multiple alignments. When the scoring function is the sum-of-pairs objective and induced pairwise alignments are evaluated using linear gap-costs, we call this problem Aligning Alignments. While seemingly a strai...

Although multiple sequence alignments (MSAs) are essential for a wide range of applications from structure modeling to prediction of functional sites, construction of accurate MSAs for distantly related proteins remains a largely unsolved problem. The rapidly increasing database of spatial structures is a valuable source to improve alignment quality. We explore the use of 3D structural informat...

Profile-profile methods are well suited to detect remote evolutionary relationships between protein families. Profile Comparer (PRC) is an existing stand-alone program for scoring and aligning hidden Markov models (HMMs), which are based on multiple sequence alignments. Since PRC compares profile HMMs instead of sequences, it can be used to find distant homologues. For this purpose, PRC is used...

MOTIVATION Multiple sequence alignments can be constructed on the basis of pairwise local sequence similarities. This approach is rather flexible and can combine the advantages of global and local alignment methods. The restriction to pairwise alignments as building blocks, however, can lead to misalignments since weak homologies may be missed if only pairs of sequences are compared. RESULTS ...