Related Articles

Background

Accurate sequence alignment is required in many bioinformatics applications but, when sequence similarity is low, it is difficult to obtain accurate alignments based on sequence similarity alone. The accuracy improves when the structures are available, but current structure-based sequence alignment procedures still mis-align substantial numbers of residues. In order to correct such errors, we previously explored the possibility of replacing the residue-based dynamic programming algorithm in structure alignment procedures with the Seed Extension algorithm, which does not use a gap penalty. Here, we describe a new procedure called RSE (Refinement with Seed Extension) that iteratively refines a structure-based sequence alignment.

Results

RSE uses SE (Seed Extension) in its core, which is an algorithm that we reported recently for obtaining a sequence alignment from two superimposed structures. The RSE procedure was evaluated by comparing the correctly aligned fractions of residues before and after the refinement of the structure-based sequence alignments produced by popular programs. CE, DaliLite, FAST, LOCK2, MATRAS, MATT, TM-align, SHEBA and VAST were included in this analysis and the NCBI's CDD root node set was used as the reference alignments. RSE improved the average accuracy of sequence alignments for all programs tested when no shift error was allowed. The amount of improvement varied depending on the program. The average improvements were small for DaliLite and MATRAS but about 5% for CE and VAST. More substantial improvements have been seen in many individual cases. The additional computation times required for the refinements were negligible compared to the times taken by the structure alignment programs.

Conclusion

RSE is a computationally inexpensive way of improving the accuracy of a structure-based sequence alignment. It can be used as a standalone procedure following a regular structure-based sequence alignment or to replace the traditional iterative refinement procedures based on residue-level dynamic programming algorithm in many structure alignment programs.

Background

Predicting new non-coding RNAs (ncRNAs) of a family can be done by aligning the potential candidate with a member of the family with known sequence and secondary structure. Existing tools either only consider the sequence similarity or cannot handle local alignment with gaps.

Results

In this paper, we consider the problem of finding the optimal local structural alignment between a query RNA sequence (with known secondary structure) and a target sequence (with unknown secondary structure) with the affine gap penalty model. We provide the algorithm to solve the problem.

Conclusions

Based on an experiment, we show that there are ncRNA families in which considering local structural alignment with gap penalty model can identify real hits more effectively than using global alignment or local alignment without gap penalty model.

The Smith–Waterman algorithm yields a single alignment, which, albeit optimal, can be strongly affected by the choice of the scoring matrix and the gap penalties. Additionally, the scores obtained are dependent upon the lengths of the aligned sequences, requiring a post-analysis conversion. To overcome some of these shortcomings, we developed a Bayesian algorithm for local sequence alignment (BALSA), that takes into account the uncertainty associated with all unknown variables by incorporating in its forward sums a series of scoring matrices, gap parameters and all possible alignments. The algorithm can return both the joint and the marginal optimal alignments, samples of alignments drawn from the posterior distribution and the posterior probabilities of gap penalties and scoring matrices. Furthermore, it automatically adjusts for variations in sequence lengths. BALSA was compared with SSEARCH, to date the best performing dynamic programming algorithm in the detection of structural neighbors. Using the SCOP databases PDB40D-B and PDB90D-B, BALSA detected 19.8 and 41.3% of remote homologs whereas SSEARCH detected 18.4 and 38% at an error rate of 1% errors per query over the databases, respectively.

Background

The presence of gaps in an alignment of nucleotide or protein sequences is often an inconvenience for bioinformatical studies. In phylogenetic and other analyses, for instance, gapped columns are often discarded entirely from the alignment.

Results

MaxAlign is a program that optimizes the alignment prior to such analyses. Specifically, it maximizes the number of nucleotide (or amino acid) symbols that are present in gap-free columns – the alignment area – by selecting the optimal subset of sequences to exclude from the alignment.

MaxAlign can be used prior to phylogenetic and bioinformatical analyses as well as in other situations where this form of alignment improvement is useful. In this work we test MaxAlign's performance in these tasks and compare the accuracy of phylogenetic estimates including and excluding gapped columns from the analysis, with and without processing with MaxAlign. In this paper we also introduce a new simple measure of tree similarity, Normalized Symmetric Similarity (NSS) that we consider useful for comparing tree topologies.

Conclusion

We demonstrate how MaxAlign is helpful in detecting misaligned or defective sequences without requiring manual inspection. We also show that it is not advisable to exclude gapped columns from phylogenetic analyses unless MaxAlign is used first. Finally, we find that the sequences removed by MaxAlign from an alignment tend to be those that would otherwise be associated with low phylogenetic accuracy, and that the presence of gaps in any given sequence does not seem to disturb the phylogenetic estimates of other sequences.

The MaxAlign web-server is freely available online at http://www.cbs.dtu.dk/services/MaxAlign where supplementary information can also be found. The program is also freely available as a Perl stand-alone package.

This paper introduces the novel method of contact-based protein sequence alignment, where structural information in the form of contact mutation probabilities is incorporated into an alignment routine using contact-mutation matrices (CAO: Contact Accepted mutatiOn). The contact-based alignment routine optimizes the score of matched contacts, which involves four (two per contact) instead of two residues per match in pairwise alignments. The first contact refers to a real side-chain contact in a template sequence with known structure, and the second contact is the equivalent putative contact of a homologous query sequence with unknown structure. An algorithm has been devised to perform a pairwise sequence alignment based on contact information. The contact scores were combined with PAM-type (Point Accepted Mutation) substitution scores after parameterization of gap penalties and score weights by means of a genetic algorithm. We show that owing to the structural information contained in the CAO matrices, significantly improved alignments of distantly related sequences can be obtained. This has allowed us to annotate eight putative Drosophila IGF sequences. Contact-based sequence alignment should therefore prove useful in comparative modelling and fold recognition.

This paper presents a new information theoretic framework for aligning sequences in bioinformatics. A transmitter compresses a set of sequences by constructing a regular expression that describes the regions of similarity in the sequences. To retrieve the original set of sequences, a receiver generates all strings that match the expression. An alignment algorithm uses minimum description length to encode and explore alternative expressions; the expression with the shortest encoding provides the best overall alignment. When two substrings contain letters that are similar according to a substitution matrix, a code length function based on conditional probabilities defined by the matrix will encode the substrings with fewer bits. In one experiment, alignments produced with this new method were found to be comparable to alignments from . A second experiment measured the accuracy of the new method on pairwise alignments of sequences from the BAliBASE alignment benchmark.

In this article, we introduce PicXAA-Web, a web-based platform for accurate probabilistic alignment of multiple biological sequences. The core of PicXAA-Web consists of PicXAA, a multiple protein/DNA sequence alignment algorithm, and PicXAA-R, an extension of PicXAA for structural alignment of RNA sequences. Both PicXAA and PicXAA-R are probabilistic non-progressive alignment algorithms that aim to find the optimal alignment of multiple biological sequences by maximizing the expected accuracy. PicXAA and PicXAA-R greedily build up the alignment from sequence regions with high local similarity, thereby yielding an accurate global alignment that effectively captures local similarities among sequences. PicXAA-Web integrates these two algorithms in a user-friendly web platform for accurate alignment and analysis of multiple protein, DNA and RNA sequences. PicXAA-Web can be freely accessed at http://gsp.tamu.edu/picxaa/.

The statistical behavior of the similarity score for unrelated DNA sequences calculated as letter-by-letter comparison or from various forms of optimal alignment was studied. It was found that natural DNA-sequences from a data base and true random sequences show the same statistical behavior in terms of such scores. This makes it possible to adopt a simple criterion for the rejection of fortuitous similarity. It is based on the mean and standard deviation of chance scores whose expected values, depending on chain length, gap penalty and probability of letter coincidence, may be calculated from formulae given in the paper.

DIAL (dihedral alignment) is a web server that provides public access to a new dynamic programming algorithm for pairwise 3D structural alignment of RNA. DIAL achieves quadratic time by performing an alignment that accounts for (i) pseudo-dihedral and/or dihedral angle similarity, (ii) nucleotide sequence similarity and (iii) nucleotide base-pairing similarity.

DIAL provides access to three alignment algorithms: global (Needleman–Wunsch), local (Smith–Waterman) and semiglobal (modified to yield motif search). Suboptimal alignments are optionally returned, and also Boltzmann pair probabilities Pr(ai,bj) for aligned positions ai , bj from the optimal alignment. If a non-zero suboptimal alignment score ratio is entered, then the semiglobal alignment algorithm may be used to detect structurally similar occurrences of a user-specified 3D motif. The query motif may be contiguous in the linear chain or fragmented in a number of noncontiguous regions.

The DIAL web server provides graphical output which allows the user to view, rotate and enlarge the 3D superposition for the optimal (and suboptimal) alignment of query to target. Although graphical output is available for all three algorithms, the semiglobal motif search may be of most interest in attempts to identify RNA motifs. DIAL is available at http://bioinformatics.bc.edu/clotelab/DIAL.

BCL::Align is a multiple sequence alignment tool that utilizes the dynamic programming method in combination with a customizable scoring function for sequence alignment and fold recognition. The scoring function is a weighted sum of the traditional PAM and BLOSUM scoring matrices, position specific scoring matrices output by PSI-BLAST, secondary structure predicted by a variety of methods, chemical properties, and gap penalties. By adjusting the weights, the method can be tailored for fold recognition or sequence alignment tasks at different levels of sequence identity. A Monte Carlo algorithm was used to determine optimized weight sets for sequence alignment and fold recognition that most accurately reproduced the SABmark reference alignment test set. In an evaluation of sequence alignment performance, BCL::Align ranked best in alignment accuracy (Cline score of 22.90 for sequences in the Twilight Zone) when compared with Align-m, ClustalW, T-Coffee, and MUSCLE. ROC curve analysis indicates BCL::Align’s ability to correctly recognize protein folds with over 80% accuracy. The flexibility of the program allows it to be optimized for specific classes of proteins (e.g. membrane proteins) or fold families (e.g. TIM-barrel proteins). BCL::Align is free for academic use and available online at http://www.meilerlab.org/.

Multiple sequence alignment, which is of fundamental importance for comparative genomics, is a difficult problem and error-prone. Therefore, it is essential to measure the reliability of the alignments and incorporate it into downstream analyses. We propose a new probabilistic sampling-based alignment reliability (PSAR) score. Instead of relying on heuristic assumptions, such as the correlation between alignment quality and guide tree uncertainty in progressive alignment methods, we directly generate suboptimal alignments from an input multiple sequence alignment by a probabilistic sampling method, and compute the agreement of the input alignment with the suboptimal alignments as the alignment reliability score. We construct the suboptimal alignments by an approximate method that is based on pairwise comparisons between each single sequence and the sub-alignment of the input alignment where the chosen sequence is left out. By using simulation-based benchmarks, we find that our approach is superior to existing ones, supporting that the suboptimal alignments are highly informative source for assessing alignment reliability. We apply the PSAR method to the alignments in the UCSC Genome Browser to measure the reliability of alignments in different types of regions, such as coding exons and conserved non-coding regions, and use it to guide cross-species conservation study.

Background

Computational prediction of noncoding RNAs (ncRNAs) is an important task in the post-genomic era. One common approach is to utilize the profile information contained in alignment data rather than single sequences. However, this strategy involves the possibility that the quality of input alignments can influence the performance of prediction methods. Therefore, the evaluation of the robustness against alignment errors is necessary as well as the development of accurate prediction methods.

Results

We describe a new method, called Profile BPLA kernel, which predicts ncRNAs from alignment data in combination with support vector machines (SVMs). Profile BPLA kernel is an extension of base-pairing profile local alignment (BPLA) kernel which we previously developed for the prediction from single sequences. By utilizing the profile information of alignment data, the proposed kernel can achieve better accuracy than the original BPLA kernel. We show that Profile BPLA kernel outperforms the existing prediction methods which also utilize the profile information using the high-quality structural alignment dataset. In addition to these standard benchmark tests, we extensively evaluate the robustness of Profile BPLA kernel against errors in input alignments. We consider two different types of error: first, that all sequences in an alignment are actually ncRNAs but are aligned ignoring their secondary structures; second, that an alignment contains unrelated sequences which are not ncRNAs but still aligned. In both cases, the effects on the performance of Profile BPLA kernel are surprisingly small. Especially for the latter case, we demonstrate that Profile BPLA kernel is more robust compared to the existing prediction methods.

Conclusions

Profile BPLA kernel provides a promising way for identifying ncRNAs from alignment data. It is more accurate than the existing prediction methods, and can keep its performance under the practical situations in which the quality of input alignments is not necessarily high.

Background

Existing sequence alignment algorithms assume that similarities between DNA or amino acid sequences are linearly ordered. That is, stretches of similar nucleotides or amino acids are in the same order in both sequences. Recombination perturbs this order. An algorithm that can reconstruct sequence similarity despite rearrangement would be helpful for reconstructing the evolutionary history of recombined sequences.

Results

We propose a graph-based algorithm for combining multiple local alignments to a query sequence into the single combination of alignments that either covers the maximal portion of the query or results in the single highest alignment score to the query. This algorithm can help study the process of genome rearrangement, improve functional gene annotation, and reconstruct the evolutionary history of recombined proteins. The algorithm takes O(n2) time, where n is the number of local alignments considered.

Conclusions

We discuss two example applications of the algorithm. The algorithm is able to provide useful reconstructions of the metazoan mitochondrial genome. It is also able to increase the percentage of a query sequence's amino acid residues for which similar stretches of amino acids can be found in sequence databases.

Summary: Dynamic programming (DP) is a general optimization strategy that is successfully used across various disciplines of science. In bioinformatics, it is widely applied in calculating the optimal alignment between pairs of protein or DNA sequences. These alignments form the basis of new, verifiable biological hypothesis. Despite its importance, there are no interactive tools available for training and education on understanding the DP algorithm. Here, we introduce an interactive computer application with a graphical interface, for the purpose of educating students about DP. The program displays the DP scoring matrix and the resulting optimal alignment(s), while allowing the user to modify key parameters such as the values in the similarity matrix, the sequence alignment algorithm version and the gap opening/extension penalties.

We hope that this software will be useful to teachers and students of bioinformatics courses, as well as researchers who implement the DP algorithm for diverse applications.

Availability and Implementation: The software is freely available at: http:/melolab.org/sat. The software is written in the Java computer language, thus it runs on all major platforms and operating systems including Windows, Mac OS X and LINUX.

Contact: All inquiries or comments about this software should be directed to Francisco Melo at fmelo@bio.puc.cl

Most sequence alignment tools can successfully align protein sequences with higher levels of sequence identity. The accuracy of corresponding structure alignment, however, decreases rapidly when considering distantly related sequences (<20% identity). In this range of identity, alignments optimized so as to maximize sequence similarity are often inaccurate from a structural point of view. Over the last two decades, most multiple protein aligners have been optimized for their capacity to reproduce structure-based alignments while using sequence information. Methods currently available differ essentially in the similarity measurement between aligned residues using substitution matrices, Fourier transform, sophisticated profile-profile functions, or consistency-based approaches, more recently.

In this paper, we present a flexible similarity measure for residue pairs to improve the quality of protein sequence alignment. Our approach, called SymAlign, relies on the identification of conserved words found across a sizeable fraction of the considered dataset, and supported by evolutionary analysis. These words are then used to define a position specific substitution matrix that better reflects the biological significance of local similarity. The experiment results show that the SymAlign scoring scheme can be incorporated within T-Coffee to improve sequence alignment accuracy. We also demonstrate that SymAlign is less sensitive to the presence of structurally non-similar proteins. In the analysis of the relationship between sequence identity and structure similarity, SymAlign can better differentiate structurally similar proteins from non- similar proteins.

We show that protein sequence alignments can be significantly improved using a similarity estimation based on weighted n-grams. In our analysis of the alignments thus produced, sequence conservation becomes a better indicator of structural similarity. SymAlign also provides alignment visualization that can display sub-optimal alignments on dot-matrices. The visualization makes it easy to identify well-supported alternative alignments that may not have been identified by dynamic programming. SymAlign is available at http://bio-cluster.iis.sinica.edu.tw/SymAlign/.

In shotgun sequencing, statistical reconstruction of a consensus from alignment requires a model of measurement error. Churchill and Waterman proposed one such model and an expectation–maximization (EM) algorithm to estimate sequencing error rates for each assembly matrix. Ewing and Green defined Phred quality scores for base-calling from sequencing traces by training a model on a large amount of data. However, sample preparations and sequencing machines may work under different conditions in practice and therefore quality scores need to be adjusted. Moreover, the information given by quality scores is incomplete in the sense that they do not describe error patterns. We observe that each nucleotide base has its specific error pattern that varies across the range of quality values. We develop models of measurement error for shotgun sequencing by combining the two perspectives above. We propose a logistic model taking quality scores as covariates. The model is trained by a procedure combining an EM algorithm and model selection techniques. The training results in calibration of quality values and leads to a more accurate construction of consensus. Besides Phred scores obtained from ABI sequencers, we apply the same technique to calibrate quality values that come along with Beckman sequencers.

Background

Large-scale comparison of genomic sequences requires reliable tools for the search of local alignments. Practical local aligners are in general fast, but heuristic, and hence sometimes miss significant matches.

Results

We present here the local pairwise aligner STELLAR that has full sensitivity for ε-alignments, i.e. guarantees to report all local alignments of a given minimal length and maximal error rate. The aligner is composed of two steps, filtering and verification. We apply the SWIFT algorithm for lossless filtering, and have developed a new verification strategy that we prove to be exact. Our results on simulated and real genomic data confirm and quantify the conjecture that heuristic tools like BLAST or BLAT miss a large percentage of significant local alignments.

Conclusions

STELLAR is very practical and fast on very long sequences which makes it a suitable new tool for finding local alignments between genomic sequences under the edit distance model. Binaries are freely available for Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X at http://www.seqan.de/projects/stellar. The source code is freely distributed with the SeqAn C++ library version 1.3 and later at http://www.seqan.de.

There is a need for faster and more sensitive algorithms for sequence similarity searching in view of the rapidly increasing amounts of genomic sequence data available. Parallel processing capabilities in the form of the single instruction, multiple data (SIMD) technology are now available in common microprocessors and enable a single microprocessor to perform many operations in parallel. The ParAlign algorithm has been specifically designed to take advantage of this technology. The new algorithm initially exploits parallelism to perform a very rapid computation of the exact optimal ungapped alignment score for all diagonals in the alignment matrix. Then, a novel heuristic is employed to compute an approximate score of a gapped alignment by combining the scores of several diagonals. This approximate score is used to select the most interesting database sequences for a subsequent Smith–Waterman alignment, which is also parallelised. The resulting method represents a substantial improvement compared to existing heuristics. The sensitivity and specificity of ParAlign was found to be as good as Smith–Waterman implementations when the same method for computing the statistical significance of the matches was used. In terms of speed, only the significantly less sensitive NCBI BLAST 2 program was found to outperform the new approach. Online searches are available at http://dna.uio.no/search/

Background

Sequence alignment is one of the most important techniques to analyze biological systems. It is also true that the alignment is not complete and we have to develop it to look for more accurate method. In particular, an alignment for homologous sequences with low sequence similarity is not in satisfactory level. Usual methods for aligning protein sequences in recent years use a measure empirically determined. As an example, a measure is usually defined by a combination of two quantities (1) and (2) below: (1) the sum of substitutions between two residue segments, (2) the sum of gap penalties in insertion/deletion region. Such a measure is determined on the assumption that there is no an intersite correlation on the sequences. In this paper, we improve the alignment by taking the correlation of consecutive residues.

Results

We introduced a new method of alignment, called MTRAP by introducing a metric defined on compound systems of two sequences. In the benchmark tests by PREFAB 4.0 and HOMSTRAD, our pairwise alignment method gives higher accuracy than other methods such as ClustalW2, TCoffee, MAFFT. Especially for the sequences with sequence identity less than 15%, our method improves the alignment accuracy significantly. Moreover, we also showed that our algorithm works well together with a consistency-based progressive multiple alignment by modifying the TCoffee to use our measure.

Conclusions

We indicated that our method leads to a significant increase in alignment accuracy compared with other methods. Our improvement is especially clear in low identity range of sequences. The source code is available at our web page, whose address is found in the section "Availability and requirements".

We describe a multiple alignment program named MAP2 based on a generalized pairwise global alignment algorithm for handling long, different intergenic and intragenic regions in genomic sequences. The MAP2 program produces an ordered list of local multiple alignments of similar regions among sequences, where different regions between local alignments are indicated by reporting only similar regions. We propose two similarity measures for the evaluation of the performance of MAP2 and existing multiple alignment programs. Experimental results produced by MAP2 on four real sets of orthologous genomic sequences show that MAP2 rarely missed a block of transitively similar regions and that MAP2 never produced a block of regions that are not transitively similar. Experimental results by MAP2 on six simulated data sets show that MAP2 found the boundaries between similar and different regions precisely. This feature is useful for finding conserved functional elements in genomic sequences. The MAP2 program is freely available in source code form at for academic use.

The standard approach to phylogeny estimation uses two phases, in which the first phase produces an alignment on a set of homologous sequences, and the second phase estimates a tree on the multiple sequence alignment. POY, a method which seeks a tree/alignment pair minimizing the total treelength, is the most widely used alternative to this two-phase approach. The topological accuracy of trees computed under treelength optimization is, however, controversial. In particular, one study showed that treelength optimization using simple gap penalties produced poor trees and alignments, and suggested the possibility that if POY were used with an affine gap penalty, it might be able to be competitive with the best two-phase methods. In this paper we report on a study addressing this possibility. We present a new heuristic for treelength, called BeeTLe (Better Treelength), that is guaranteed to produce trees at least as short as POY. We then use this heuristic to analyze a large number of simulated and biological datasets, and compare the resultant trees and alignments to those produced using POY and also maximum likelihood (ML) and maximum parsimony (MP) trees computed on a number of alignments. In general, we find that trees produced by BeeTLe are shorter and more topologically accurate than POY trees, but that neither POY nor BeeTLe produces trees as topologically accurate as ML trees produced on standard alignments. These findings, taken as a whole, suggest that treelength optimization is not as good an approach to phylogenetic tree estimation as maximum likelihood based upon good alignment methods.

Background

Existing tools for multiple-sequence alignment focus on aligning protein sequence or protein-coding DNA sequence, and are often based on extensions to Needleman-Wunsch-like pairwise alignment methods. We introduce a new tool, Sigma, with a new algorithm and scoring scheme designed specifically for non-coding DNA sequence. This problem acquires importance with the increasing number of published sequences of closely-related species. In particular, studies of gene regulation seek to take advantage of comparative genomics, and recent algorithms for finding regulatory sites in phylogenetically-related intergenic sequence require alignment as a preprocessing step. Much can also be learned about evolution from intergenic DNA, which tends to evolve faster than coding DNA. Sigma uses a strategy of seeking the best possible gapless local alignments (a strategy earlier used by DiAlign), at each step making the best possible alignment consistent with existing alignments, and scores the significance of the alignment based on the lengths of the aligned fragments and a background model which may be supplied or estimated from an auxiliary file of intergenic DNA.

Results

Comparative tests of sigma with five earlier algorithms on synthetic data generated to mimic real data show excellent performance, with Sigma balancing high "sensitivity" (more bases aligned) with effective filtering of "incorrect" alignments. With real data, while "correctness" can't be directly quantified for the alignment, running the PhyloGibbs motif finder on pre-aligned sequence suggests that Sigma's alignments are superior.

Conclusion

By taking into account the peculiarities of non-coding DNA, Sigma fills a gap in the toolbox of bioinformatics.

Sequencing errors in combination with repeated regions cause major problems in shotgun sequencing, mainly due to the failure of assembly programs to distinguish single base differences between repeat copies from erroneous base calls. In this paper, a new strategy designed to correct errors in shotgun sequence data using defined nucleotide positions, DNPs, is presented. The method distinguishes single base differences from sequencing errors by analyzing multiple alignments consisting of a read and all its overlaps with other reads. The construction of multiple alignments is performed using a novel pattern matching algorithm, which takes advantage of the symmetry between indices that can be computed for similar words of the same length. This allows for rapid construction of multiple alignments, with no previous pair-wise matching of sequence reads required. Results from a C++ implementation of this method show that up to 99% of sequencing errors can be corrected, while up to 87% of the single base differences remain and up to 80% of the corrected reads contain at most one error. The results also show that the method outperforms the error correction method used in the EULER assembler. The prototype software, MisEd, is freely available from the authors for academic use.

Background

Detecting remote homologies by direct comparison of protein sequences remains a challenging task. We had previously developed a similarity score between sequences, called a local alignment kernel, that exhibits good performance for this task in combination with a support vector machine. The local alignment kernel depends on an amino acid substitution matrix. Since commonly used BLOSUM or PAM matrices for scoring amino acid matches have been optimized to be used in combination with the Smith-Waterman algorithm, the matrices optimal for the local alignment kernel can be different.

Results

Contrary to the local alignment score computed by the Smith-Waterman algorithm, the local alignment kernel is differentiable with respect to the amino acid substitution and its derivative can be computed efficiently by dynamic programming. We optimized the substitution matrix by classical gradient descent by setting an objective function that measures how well the local alignment kernel discriminates homologs from non-homologs in the COG database. The local alignment kernel exhibits better performance when it uses the matrices and gap parameters optimized by this procedure than when it uses the matrices optimized for the Smith-Waterman algorithm. Furthermore, the matrices and gap parameters optimized for the local alignment kernel can also be used successfully by the Smith-Waterman algorithm.

Conclusion

This optimization procedure leads to useful substitution matrices, both for the local alignment kernel and the Smith-Waterman algorithm. The best performance for homology detection is obtained by the local alignment kernel.

Background

We introduce GASH, a new, publicly accessible program for structural alignment and superposition. Alignments are scored by the Number of Equivalent Residues (NER), a quantitative measure of structural similarity that can be applied to any structural alignment method. Multiple alignments are optimized by conjugate gradient maximization of the NER score within the genetic algorithm framework. Initial alignments are generated by the program Local ASH, and can be supplemented by alignments from any other program.

Results

We compare GASH to DaliLite, CE, and to our earlier program Global ASH on a difficult test set consisting of 3,102 structure pairs, as well as a smaller set derived from the Fischer-Eisenberg set. The extent of alignment crossover, as well as the completeness of the initial set of alignments are examined. The quality of the superpositions is evaluated both by NER and by the number of aligned residues under three different RMSD cutoffs (2,4, and 6Å). In addition to the numerical assessment, the alignments for several biologically related structural pairs are discussed in detail.

Conclusion

Regardless of which criteria is used to judge the superposition accuracy, GASH achieves the best overall performance, followed by DaliLite, Global ASH, and CE. In terms of CPU usage, DaliLite CE and GASH perform similarly for query proteins under 500 residues, but for larger proteins DaliLite is faster than GASH or CE. Both an http interface and a simple object application protocol (SOAP) interface to the GASH program are available at .