Lecture GK-6

More on Perl and sequence alignment

Aims

• To present more examples of Perl programmes.
• To describe methods for constructing multiple sequence alignments.
• To describe the sequence assembly problem.
• To introduce suffix trees and their relationship to suffix tries.

Objectives

After this lecture you will be able to:

• use Perl together with other Unix programs, passing input/output to/from your Perl program from/to other programs;
• describe and apply the sum of pairs method for scoring multiple alignments;
• discuss how multi-dimensional dynamic programming can yield an optimal multiple sequence alignment;
• describe the Feng-Doolittle algorithm for progressive multiple sequence alignment;
• describe the sequence assembly problem and how a program addressing this problem can be implemented;
• draw a suffix tree for a given string.

Supplementary Material

The lecture handout, featuring some of the lecture slides, is available on-line.
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The Feng-Doolittle algorithm for progressive multiple sequence alignment is described in:

• Feng, D.F. and Doolittle, R.F. (1987) Progressive sequence alignment as a prerequisite to correct phylogenetic trees. J. Mol. Evol., 25, 351-60 (Journal web site)

Wikipedia entry for Suffix tree