A Greedy Clustering Algorithm for Multiple Sequence Alignment

Abstract

This paper presents a strategy to tackle the multiple sequence alignment (MSA) problem, which is one of the most important tasks in the biological sequence analysis. Its role is to align the sequences in their entirety to derive relationships and common characteristics between a set of protein or nucleotide sequences. The MSA problem was proved to be an NP-Hard problem. The proposed strategy incorporates a new idea based on the well-known divide-and-conquer paradigm. This paper presents a novel method of clustering sequences as a preliminary step to improve the final alignment; this decomposition can be used as an optimization procedure with any MSA aligner to explore promising alignments of the search space. In their solution, the authors proposed to align the clusters in a parallel and distributed way in order to benefit from parallel architectures. The strategy was tested using classical benchmarks like BAliBASE, Sabre, Prefab4, and Oxm, and the experimental results show that it gives good results by comparing to the other aligners.