Large-scale Multiple Sequence Alignment Research Articles

Large-Scale Multiple Sequence Alignment and the Maximum Weight Trace Alignment Merging Problem.

MAGUS is a recent multiple sequence alignment method that provides excellent accuracy on large challenging datasets. MAGUS uses divide-and-conquer: it divides the sequences into disjoint sets, computes alignments on the disjoint sets, and then merges the alignments using a technique it calls the Graph Clustering Method (GCM). To understand why MAGUS is so accurate, we show that GCM is a good heuristic for the NP-hard MWT-AM problem (Maximum Weight Trace, adapted to the Alignment Merging problem). Our study, using both biological and simulated data, establishes that MWT-AM scores correlate very well with alignment accuracy and presents improvements to GCM that are even better heuristics for MWT-AM. This study suggests a new direction for large-scale MSA estimation based on improved divide-and-conquer strategies, with the merging step based on optimizing MWT-AM. MAGUS and its enhanced versions are available at https://github.com/vlasmirnov/MAGUS.

Ksak: A high-throughput tool for alignment-free phylogenetics.

Phylogenetic tools are fundamental to the studies of evolutionary relationships. In this paper, we present Ksak, a novel high-throughput tool for alignment-free phylogenetic analysis. Ksak computes the pairwise distance matrix between molecular sequences, using seven widely accepted k-mer based distance measures. Based on the distance matrix, Ksak constructs the phylogenetic tree with standard algorithms. When benchmarked with a golden standard 16S rRNA dataset, Ksak was found to be the most accurate tool among all five tools compared and was 19% more accurate than ClustalW2, a high-accuracy multiple sequence aligner. Above all, Ksak was tens to hundreds of times faster than ClustalW2, which helps eliminate the computation limit currently encountered in large-scale multiple sequence alignment. Ksak is freely available at https://github.com/labxscut/ksak.

Instability in progressive multiple sequence alignment algorithms.

BackgroundProgressive alignment is the standard approach used to align large numbers of sequences. As with all heuristics, this involves a tradeoff between alignment accuracy and computation time.ResultsWe examine this tradeoff and find that, because of a loss of information in the early steps of the approach, the alignments generated by the most common multiple sequence alignment programs are inherently unstable, and simply reversing the order of the sequences in the input file will cause a different alignment to be generated. Although this effect is more obvious with larger numbers of sequences, it can also be seen with data sets in the order of one hundred sequences. We also outline the means to determine the number of sequences in a data set beyond which the probability of instability will become more pronounced.ConclusionsThis has major ramifications for both the designers of large-scale multiple sequence alignment algorithms, and for the users of these alignments.

Ultra-large alignments using phylogeny-aware profiles.

Many biological questions, including the estimation of deep evolutionary histories and the detection of remote homology between protein sequences, rely upon multiple sequence alignments and phylogenetic trees of large datasets. However, accurate large-scale multiple sequence alignment is very difficult, especially when the dataset contains fragmentary sequences. We present UPP, a multiple sequence alignment method that uses a new machine learning technique, the ensemble of hidden Markov models, which we propose here. UPP produces highly accurate alignments for both nucleotide and amino acid sequences, even on ultra-large datasets or datasets containing fragmentary sequences. UPP is available at https://github.com/smirarab/sepp.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s13059-015-0688-z) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Accelerated large-scale multiple sequence alignment

BackgroundMultiple sequence alignment (MSA) is a fundamental analysis method used in bioinformatics and many comparative genomic applications. Prior MSA acceleration attempts with reconfigurable computing have only addressed the first stage of progressive alignment and consequently exhibit performance limitations according to Amdahl's Law. This work is the first known to accelerate the third stage of progressive alignment on reconfigurable hardware.ResultsWe reduce subgroups of aligned sequences into discrete profiles before they are pairwise aligned on the accelerator. Using an FPGA accelerator, an overall speedup of up to 150 has been demonstrated on a large data set when compared to a 2.4 GHz Core2 processor.ConclusionsOur parallel algorithm and architecture accelerates large-scale MSA with reconfigurable computing and allows researchers to solve the larger problems that confront biologists today. Program source is available from http://dna.cs.byu.edu/msa/.

Benchmark datasets and software for developing and testing methods for large-scale multiple sequence alignment and phylogenetic inference.

We have assembled a collection of web pages that contain benchmark datasets and software tools to enable the evaluation of the accuracy and scalability of computational methods for estimating evolutionary relationships. They provide a resource to the scientific community for development of new alignment and tree inference methods on very difficult datasets. The datasets are intended to help address three problems: multiple sequence alignment, phylogeny estimation given aligned sequences, and supertree estimation. Datasets from our work include empirical datasets with carefully curated alignments suitable for testing alignment and phylogenetic methods for large-scale systematics studies. Links to other empirical datasets, lacking curated alignments, are also provided. We also include simulated datasets with properties typical of large-scale systematics studies, including high rates of substitutions and indels, and we include the true alignment and tree for each simulated dataset. Finally, we provide links to software tools for generating simulated datasets, and for evaluating the accuracy of alignments and trees estimated on these datasets. We welcome contributions to the benchmark datasets from other researchers.

Large scale multiple sequence alignment with simultaneous phylogeny inference

Multiple sequence alignment (MSA) and phylogenetic tree reconstruction are one of the most important problems in the computational biology. While both these problems are of great practical significance, in most cases they are very computationally demanding. In this paper we propose a new approach to the MSA problem which simultaneously infers an underlying phylogenetic tree. To process large data sets we provide parallel implementation of our method, which is based on the distributed caching of intermediate results. Finally, we show a parallel server designed for grid environments, and we report results of experiments performed with actual biological data, e.g. 1000 ribosomal RNA sequences.