GLProbs is a simple and effective approach to improve the accuracy of multiple sequence alignment. We use a natural measure to estimate the similarity of the input sequences, and based on this measure, we align the input sequences differently. To test the effectiveness of this approach, we have implemented a multiple sequence alignment tool called GLProbs and compared its performance with a dozen leading alignment tools on three benchmark alignment databases, and GLProbs’s alignments has the best scores in almost all testings. We have also evaluated the practicability of the alignments of GLProbs by applying the tool to three biological applications, namely phylogenetic trees construction, protein secondary structure prediction and the detection of high risk members for cervical cancer in the HPV-E6 family, and the results are very encouraging.
multiple sequence alignment, progressive alignment, hidden Markov model, phylogenetic analysis, secondary structure prediction
Yongtao Ye, David W. Cheung, Yadong Wang, Siu-Ming Yiu, Qing Zhan, Tak-Wah Lam, and Hing-Fung Ting. 2013. GLProbs: Aligning multiple sequences adaptively. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Bioinformatics, Computational Biology and Biomedical Informatics (BCB'13). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 152–160. https://doi.org/10.1145/2506583.2506611