A probabilistic coding based quantum genetic algorithm for multiple sequence alignment.

This paper presents an original Quantum Genetic algorithm for Multiple sequence ALIGNment (QGMALIGN) that combines a genetic algorithm and a quantum algorithm. A quantum probabilistic coding is designed for representing the multiple sequence alignment. A quantum rotation gate as a mutation operator is used to guide the quantum state evolution. Six genetic operators are designed on the coding basis to improve the solution during the evolutionary process. The features of implicit parallelism and state superposition in quantum mechanics and the global search capability of the genetic algorithm are exploited to get efficient computation. A set of well known test cases from BAliBASE2.0 is used as reference to evaluate the efficiency of the QGMALIGN optimization. The QGMALIGN results have been compared with the most popular methods (CLUSTALX, SAGA, DIALIGN, SB_PIMA, and QGMALIGN) results. The QGMALIGN results show that QGMALIGN performs well on the presenting biological data. The addition of genetic operators to the quantum algorithm lowers the cost of overall running time.