Multiple sequence alignment tools on the Web.

Abstract

The immense number of nucleotide and protein sequences that can be accessed through public databases on the Internet is an invaluable resource to scientists working in the fields of molecular biology, protein chemistry and molecular diagnostics. Tools such as BLAST (1) (also discussed in the March 2000 Internet On-Ramp) and FASTA (7) are used mainly to search for database sequences that are similar or potentially homologous to query sequences supplied by the investigator. However, in many circumstances, this is only the first stage of a more complex series of sequence analyses. Multiple sequence alignment analyses are fundamental in allowing investigators to draw conclusions about the similarity, function, structure and the potential evolutionary relationships between sequences. This column will focus on a number of different multiple sequence alignment tools available as services over the Web.