Tetsuo Shibuya (shibuya@is.s.u-tokyo.ac.jp)
Hiroshi Imai (imai@is.s.u-tokyo.ac.jp)
Department of Information Science, Faculty of Science,
University of Tokyo
7-3-1 Hongo, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo 113, Japan
The alignment problem of DNA or protein sequences is very applicable and important in various fields of molecular biology. In this problem, the obtained optimal solution with fixed parameters (gap penalties, weights for weighted multiple alignment problems, and so on) is not always the biologically best alignment. Thus, it is required to vary parameters and check the varying optimal alignments. The way to vary parameters has been studied well on the problem of only two sequences [6,7,12,13,14,15], but not in the multiple alignment problem because of the difficulty of computing the optimal solution. This paper presents techniques for parametric multiple alignment problem, and examines the features of obtained alignments by parametric analysis on gap penalty and weight matrix through experiments. These experiments reveal the importance of adopting appropriate parameter values to obtain meaningful multiple alignments.