nodalpoint.org

In a recent Science magazine article, Löytynoja-Goldman showed that all current Multiple Sequence Alignment algorithms – the bread-and-butter algorithm for biologists studying similarities in genes across different species – completely fail to detect independent insertions in the alignment of sequences, and thus, erroneously mismatches regions of evolutionary volatility. In their improved MSA algorithm, PRANK, they use history itself to improve the performance of this basic algorithm. [more...]