Fall 2006 Database Seminar

Wednesday November 15th, 2006
CSE Room 305
12:00 - 1:00 PM

Multiple Sequence Alignment Solutions and Applications

Xu Zhang

The rapid progress of computer science, as an assistant to biology led to the field of bioinformatics. In this area, multiple sequence alignment (MSA) is a fundamental problem. MSA is widely used in many applications such as protein structure prediction, phylogenetic analysis, identification of conserved motifs, protein classification and genome primer identification.

MSA is a challenging problem for finding the multiple sequence alignment that maximizes the SP (Sum-of-Pairs) score is NP-complete. Also, finding an alignment that is biologically meaningful is not trivial since the SP score may not reflect the biological significances. The presentation addresses these problems. More specifically we consider three problems. First, we propose to apply secondary structure information of residues to build a biological meaningful alignment. Second we develop an efficient algorithm to optimize the SP score of MSA. The third problem addresses how multiple sequences can be used for primer prediction.

 


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