Sequence Alignment

Sequence alignment is a way of arranging DNA, RNA or protein sequences to identify regions of similarity that may indicate functional, structural or evolutionary relationships between them. Aligned sequences are typically written as rows in a matrix, with gaps inserted so that identical or similar characters line up in the same columns; the degree of similarity at a given position indicates how conserved that region is across the sequences compared. Pairwise alignment compares two sequences at a time and is computationally efficient, making it well suited to database searches, while multiple sequence alignment incorporates three or more sequences at once, at greater computational cost, and is used to find conserved motifs, build phylogenetic trees and locate functionally important sites such as enzyme active sites. Both kinds of alignment are computed with a range of algorithmic strategies, from exact dynamic programming methods to faster heuristics, chosen according to sequence length and available computing resources. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/