Most multi-alignment methods are fully automated, i.e. they are based on a fixed set of mathematical rules. For various reasons, such methods may fail to produce biologically meaningful alignments. Herein, we describe a semi-automatic approach to multiple sequence alignment where biological expert knowledge can be used to influence the alignment procedure. The user can specify parts of the sequences that are biologically related to each other; our software program uses these sites as anchor points and creates a multiple alignment respecting these user-defined constraints. By using known functionally, structurally or evolutionarily related positions of the input sequences as anchor points, our method can produce alignments that reflect the true biological relationships among the input sequences more accurately than fully automated procedures can do.
Comparative analysis of genomic sequences is a powerful approach to discover functional sites in these sequences. Herein, we present a WWW-based software system for multiple alignment of genomic sequences. We use the local alignment tool CHAOS to rapidly identify chains of pairwise similarities. These similarities are used as anchor points to speed up the DIALIGN multiple-alignment program. Finally, the visualization tool ABC is used for interactive graphical representation of the resulting multiple alignments. Our software is available at Göttingen Bioinformatics Compute Server (GOBICS) at
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