With arguably the best finished and expertly annotated genome assembly, Drosophila melanogaster is a formidable genetics model to study all aspects of biology. Nearly a decade ago, the 12 Drosophila genomes project expanded D. melanogaster's breadth as a comparative model through the community-development of an unprecedented genus- and genome-wide comparative resource. However, since its incept...

SUMMARY Dynamic programming (DP) is a general optimization strategy that is successfully used across various disciplines of science. In bioinformatics, it is widely applied in calculating the optimal alignment between pairs of protein or DNA sequences. These alignments form the basis of new, verifiable biological hypothesis. Despite its importance, there are no interactive tools available for t...

When aligning several hundreds or thousands of sequences, such as HIVs, dengue virus, and influenza viruses, to reconstruct the epidemiological history or to understand the mechanisms of epidemic virus evolution, how to analyze and visualize the large-number alignment results has become a new challenge for computational biologists. Although there are several tools available for visualization of...

Multiple sequence alignments play a central role in the annotation of novel genomes. Given the biological and computational complexity of this task, the automatic generation of high-quality alignments remains challenging. Since multiple alignments are usually employed at the very start of data analysis pipelines, it is crucial to ensure high alignment quality. We describe a simple, yet elegant,...

In this paper, we improve the idea of the near-optimal alignments. Though the near optimal alignments increase the possibility to find the correct alignment, too many of them may confuse the biologists. So we present the filter scheme for the near-optimal alignments. An easy method to trace the nearoptimal alignments and an algorithm to filter those alignments are proposed.1 The time complexity...