On Efficiency of Sequence Alignment Algorithms

Abstract

The alignment of sequences is a mutual agreement of two or more sequences which exhibit their similarities where they differ. Sequence alignment is usually used to study the evolution of the sequences from a common ancestor, especially biological sequences such as protein sequences or deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) sequences. Sequence alignment can also be used to study the evolution of languages and the similarity between texts. In this paper, we discuss sequence alignments for finding similarities between sequences, homologues (relatives) on a gene or gene-product in genomic databases. This information is useful for answering a variety of biologically related questions.