Visual analysis and comparison of multiple sequence alignments

Abstract

Multiple Sequence Alignments (MSA) of a set of DNA, RNA or protein sequences form the fundamental basis for various biological applications such as evolutionary heritage and protein structure prediction. The quality of an MSA is crucial in order to provide useful and correct results. The analysis of MSAs is, however, still a challenging task since constructing MSAs is an NP hard problem and thus the optimal MSA is usually unknown. Additionally, MSA quality analysis is often completely ignored, especially by non-expert users, due to the lack of tools for the visual comparison and the intuitive quality assessment of alignments. In this paper, we present an interactive visual approach to simultaneously assess the quality of multiple alternative MSAs of the same set of sequences. We provide a direct assessment of the alignment quality using different highlighting techniques in combination with automatic quality measures and editing capabilities. An in-depth evaluation of our approach highlights its benefits for MSA quality assessment.