A team at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) was given the task of using computational tools to speed up the development of DNA diagnostics for pathogen detection. This work will be described in another paper in this issue (see pages 133-149). To achieve this goal it was necessary to understand the merits and limitations of the various available comparative genomics tools. A revi...

UNLABELLED The APDB webserver uses structural information to evaluate the alignment of sequences with known structures. It returns a score correlated to the overall alignment accuracy as well as a local evaluation. Any sequence alignment can be analyzed with APDB provided it includes at least two proteins with known structures. Sequences without a known structure are simply ignored and do not c...

Alignments of frequency profiles against frequency profiles have a wide scope of applications in currently used bioinformatic analysis tools ranging from multiple alignment methods based on the progressive alignment approach to detecting of structural similarities based on remote sequence homology. We present the new log average scoring approach to calculating the score to be used with alignmen...

Recent work on whole genome alignment has resulted in efficient tools to locate (possibly) conserved regions of two genomic sequences. Most of such tools start with locating a set of short and highly similar substrings (called anchors) that are present in both genomes. These anchors provide clues for the conserved regions, and the effectiveness of the tools is highly related to the quality of t...

MOTIVATION Multiple sequence alignment is an important tool to understand and analyze functions of homologous proteins. However, the logic of residue conservation/variation is usually apparent only in three-dimensional (3D) space, not on a primary sequence level. Thus, in a traditional multiple alignment it is often difficult to directly visualize and analyze key residues because they are maske...

During the last years several new tools applicable to protein analysis have made available on the IBIVU web site. Recently, a number of tools, ranging from multiple sequence alignment construction to domain prediction, have been updated and/or extended with services for programmatic access using SOAP. We provide an overview of these tools and their application.

Once the horizontal alignment of a forest road section between two known locations has been determined by establishing a series of intersection points, the most economic vertical alignment can be identified using heuristic techniques. In a previous research work, Simulated Annealing (SA) was used to locate the optimal vertical alignment for a preselected horizontal alignment, while subject to t...

Sequence alignment is an important task for molecular biologists. Because alignment basically deals with approximate string matching on large biological sequence collections, it is both data intensive and computationally complex. There exist several tools for the variety of problems related to sequence alignment. Our first observation is that the term ’sequence database’ is used in general for ...

Due to recent algorithmic progress, tools for the gold standard of comparative RNA analysis, namely Sankoff-style simultaneous alignment and folding, are now readily applicable. Such approaches, however, compare RNAs with respect to a simultaneously predicted, single, nested consensus structure. To make multiple alignment of RNAs available in cases, where this limitation of the standard approac...

MOTIVATION Many multiple sequence alignment tools have been developed in the past, progressing either in speed or alignment accuracy. Given the importance and wide-spread use of alignment tools, progress in both categories is a contribution to the community and has driven research in the field so far. RESULTS We introduce a graph-based extension to the consistency-based, progressive alignment...