Sequence alignment

In bioinformatics, a sequence alignment is a way of arranging the sequences of DNA, RNA, or protein to identify regions of similarity that may be a consequence of functional, structural, or evolutionary relationships between the sequences.[1] Aligned sequences of nucleotide or amino acid residues are typically represented as rows within a matrix. Gaps are inserted between the residues so that identical or similar characters are aligned in successive columns. Sequence alignments are also used for non-biological sequences such as calculating the distance cost between strings in a natural language, or to display financial data.

A sequence alignment, produced by ClustalO, of mammalian histone proteins.
Sequences are the amino acids for residues 120-180 of the proteins. Residues that are conserved across all sequences are highlighted in grey. Below the protein sequences is a key denoting conserved sequence (*), conservative mutations (:), semi-conservative mutations (.), and non-conservative mutations ( ).[2]
  1. ^ Mount DM. (2004). Bioinformatics: Sequence and Genome Analysis (2nd ed.). Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press: Cold Spring Harbor, NY. ISBN 978-0-87969-608-5.
  2. ^ "Clustal FAQ #Symbols". Clustal. Archived from the original on 24 October 2016. Retrieved 8 December 2014.