The tree alignment problem.

The multiple sequence alignment (MSA) problem has become relevant to several areas in bioinformatics from finding sequences family, detecting structural homologies of protein/DNA sequences, determining functions of protein/DNA sequences to predict patients diseases by comparing DNAs of patients in disease discovery, etc. The MSA is a NP-hard problem. In this paper, two new methods based on a cultural algorithm, namely the method of musical composition, for the solution of the MSA problem are introduced. The performance of the first and second versions were evaluated and analyzed on 26 and 12 different benchmark alignments, respectively. Test instances were taken from BAliBASE 3.0. Alignment accuracies are computed using the QSCORE program, which is a quality scoring program that compares two multiple sequence alignments. Numerical results on the tackled instances indicate that the performance levels of the proposed versions of the MMC are promising. In particular, the experimental results show that the second version found the best alignment reported in the specialized literature in 25 $$\%$$% of the tested instances. Besides, for 50 $$\%$$% of the tested instances, the second version achieved the second best alignment. Finally, the significance of the numerical results were analyzed according to the Wilcoxon rank-sum test, which indicated that the second proposed version is statistically similar to some state-of-the-art techniques for the MSA problem.

This paper presents a novel approach for solving the Multiple Sequence Alignment (MSA) problem. K-Means clustering is combined with the Rubber Band Technique (RBT) to introduce an iterative optimization algorithm, namely RBT-Km, to find the optimal alignment for a set of input protein sequences. In this technique, the MSA problem is modeled as a Rubber Band, while the solution space is modeled as plate with several poles corresponding locations in the input sequences that are most likely to be correlated and/or biologically related. K-Means clustering is then used to discriminate biologically related locations from those that may appear by chance. RBT-Km is tested with one of the well-known benchmarks in this field (BALiBASE 2.0). The results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed technique even in the case of formidable sequences.

This article presents an immune inspired algorithm to tackle the Multiple Sequence Alignment (MSA) problem. MSA is one of the most important tasks in biological sequence analysis. Although this paper focuses on protein alignments, most of the discussion and methodology may also be applied to DNA alignments. The problem of finding the multiple alignment was investigated in the study by Bonizzoni and Vedova and Wang and Jiang, and proved to be a NP-hard (non-deterministic polynomial-time hard) problem. The presented algorithm, called Immunological Multiple Sequence Alignment Algorithm (IMSA), incorporates two new strategies to create the initial population and specific ad hoc mutation operators. It is based on the ‘weighted sum of pairs’ as objective function, to evaluate a given candidate alignment. IMSA was tested using both classical benchmarks of BAliBASE (versions 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0), and experimental results indicate that it is comparable with state-of-the-art multiple alignment algorithms, in terms of quality of alignments, weighted Sums-of-Pairs (SP) and Column Score (CS) values. The main novelty of IMSA is its ability to generate more than a single suboptimal alignment, for every MSA instance; this behaviour is due to the stochastic nature of the algorithm and of the populations evolved during the convergence process. This feature will help the decision maker to assess and select a biologically relevant multiple sequence alignment. Finally, the designed algorithm can be used as a local search procedure to properly explore promising alignments of the search space.

The problem of multiple sequence alignment (MSA) in biology has been studied extensively. In this paper we offer sampling based algorithms for MSA that are more accurate than existing algorithms. The performance of our algorithms has been evaluated using the standard BaliBase dataset [10]. We are able to improve the average alignment SP score for ClustalW [9] and MAFFT [6] by 16.39% and 12.2 %, respectively and the TC score by 55.4% and 46.9%, respectively using sampling. Given that ClustalW and MAFFT are some of the most accurate algorithms for MSA currently and are widely used, our algorithms would be of interest to biologists.

The conventional multiple sequence alignment algorithms are classi ed into two categories: iterative improvement strategies (e.g., [1]) and simulated annealing methods (e.g., [6]). Recently, a genetic algorithm has been used in computational molecular biology as a powerful combinatorial optimizer. A genetic algorithm has been applied to the problem of multiple sequence alignment on a parallel computer (e.g., [7]). In a simple genetic algorithm [3], a solution of a given problem is represented as \chromosomes which consists of bit strings of 0's and 1's. The genetic operations, such as reproduction, crossover and mutation, are applied to a population of chromosomes to create a new population of chromosomes. This process is repeated many times so that we can obtain a nearly optimal alignment. Here, we propose a improved method to apply a genetic algorithm to the problem of multiple sequence aligment. The processing was performed on a Fujitsu SPARCstation 20 and NEC UP4800.

One of the most challenging tasks in bioinformatics is the resolution of Multiple Sequence Alignment (MSA) problem. It consists in comparing a set of protein or DNA sequences, in aim of predicting their structure and function. This paper introduces a new bio-inspired approach to solve such problem. This approach named BA-MSA is based on Bat Algorithm. Bat Algorithm (BA) is a recent evolutionary algorithm inspired from Bats behavior seeking their prey. The proposed approach includes new mechanism to generate initial population. It consists in generating a guide tree for each solution with progressive approach by varying some parameters. The generated guide tree will be enhanced by Hill-Climbing algorithm. In addition, to deal with the premature convergence of BA, a new restart technique is proposed to introduce more diversification when detecting premature convergence. Balibase 2.0 datasets are used for experiments. The comparison with well-known methods as MSA-GA MSA-GA (w\prealign), ClustalW, and SAGA and recent method (BBOMP) shows the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

In this research work, we propose a new cooperative aligner based on metaheuristics to find an approximate solution to the multiple-sequence alignment (MSA) problem. The developed approach named HPSOSA apply in the first stage the particle swarm optimisation (PSO) with a crossover operator as a move mechanism for each particle. In the second stage, simulated annealing is incorporated in order to improve worst solutions in the population and to help HPSOSA to escape from local optimum alignment. Simulation results on BaliBASE benchmarks have demonstrated the capability of the proposed method to obtain better results for the MSA problem compared to those produced by some literature works in the same field.

Multiple sequence alignment (MSA) is a traditional and still challenging task for time-series analyses. The MSA problem is intrinsically a discrete optimization and, in principle, dynamic programming is available for solving MSA. However, the computation complexity of such algorithms increases exponentially with the number of sequences to be aligned. In this paper, we propose neural time warping (NTW) that relaxes the original MSA to a continuous optimization, in which a neural network is used to model the alignment. We show that the solution of NTW is guaranteed to be a feasible solution of the original discrete problem under mild conditions. Our experimental results suggest that NTW successfully aligns a hundred sequences and significantly outperforms existing methods for solving the MSA problem.

BackgroundReconstruction of multiple sequence alignments (MSAs) is a crucial step in most homology-based sequence analyses, which constitute an integral part of computational biology. To improve the accuracy of this crucial step, it is essential to better characterize errors that state-of-the-art aligners typically make. For this purpose, we here introduce two tools: the complete-likelihood score and the position-shift map.ResultsThe logarithm of the total probability of a MSA under a stochastic model of sequence evolution along a time axis via substitutions, insertions and deletions (called the “complete-likelihood score” here) can serve as an ideal score of the MSA. A position-shift map, which maps the difference in each residue’s position between two MSAs onto one of them, can clearly visualize where and how MSA errors occurred and help disentangle composite errors. To characterize MSA errors using these tools, we constructed three sets of simulated MSAs of selectively neutral mammalian DNA sequences, with small, moderate and large divergences, under a stochastic evolutionary model with an empirically common power-law insertion/deletion length distribution. Then, we reconstructed MSAs using MAFFT and Prank as representative state-of-the-art single-optimum-search aligners. About 40–99% of the hundreds of thousands of gapped segments were involved in alignment errors. In a substantial fraction, from about 1/4 to over 3/4, of erroneously reconstructed segments, reconstructed MSAs by each aligner showed complete-likelihood scores not lower than those of the true MSAs. Out of the remaining errors, a majority by an iterative option of MAFFT showed discrepancies between the aligner-specific score and the complete-likelihood score, and a majority by Prank seemed due to inadequate exploration of the MSA space. Analyses by position-shift maps indicated that true MSAs are in considerable neighborhoods of reconstructed MSAs in about 80–99% of the erroneous segments for small and moderate divergences, but in only a minority for large divergences.ConclusionsThe results of this study suggest that measures to further improve the accuracy of reconstructed MSAs would substantially differ depending on the types of aligners. They also re-emphasize the importance of obtaining a probability distribution of fairly likely MSAs, instead of just searching for a single optimum MSA.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s12859-016-0945-5) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Given a set W of k sequences (strings) and a tree structure T with k leaves, each of which is labeled with a unique sequence in W, a tree alignment is to label a sequence to each internal node of T. The weight of an edge of the tree alignment is the distance, such as Hamming distance, Levenshtein (edit) distance or reversal distance, between the two sequences labeled to the two ends of the edge. The bottleneck tree alignment problem is to find a tree alignment such that the weight of the largest edge is minimized. A lifted tree alignment is a tree alignment, where each internal node v is labeled one of the sequences that was labeled to the children of v. The bottleneck lifted tree alignment problem is to find a lifted tree alignment such that the weight of the largest edge is minimized. In this paper, we show that the bottleneck tree alignment problem is NP-complete even when the tree structure is the binary tree and the weight function is metric. For special cases, we present an exact algorithm to solve the bottleneck lifted tree alignment problem in polynomial time. If the weight function is ultrametric, we show that any lifted tree alignment is an optimal bottleneck tree alignment.KeywordsEdit distancebottleneck tree alignmentmetricultrametricNP-complete

On the bottleneck tree alignment problems

The alignment of more than two biological sequences is a widely used technique in a number of areas of computational biology. However, finding an optimal alignment has been shown to be an NP-complete optimization problem. Furthermore, Multiple Sequence Alignment (MSA) can be formulated according to more than one score function, leading to multi-objective formulations of this problem. Due to these reasons, metaheuristics have been proposed to deal with MSA problems. In this paper, we present jMetalMSA, an Open Source software tool for solving MSA problems with multi-objective metaheuristics. Our motivation here is to offer to the scientific community in computational biology, a platform including state-of-the-art optimization algorithms aimed at solving different formulations of the MSA. We describe the main features of jMetalMSA, including the metaheuristics and scores that are currently available. In addition, we show a working example for illustration purposes.

The multiple sequence alignment problem (MSAP) is one of the most difficult problems in computational molecular biology. In this paper, we describe the optimization model and the neighborhood structure on the MSAP, then propose a scheme to solve the MSAP using Simulated Annealing Algorithm. Experiment shows that the scheme is effcient.

Growth Optimizer: A powerful metaheuristic algorithm for solving continuous and discrete global optimization problems

Fragmented protein sequence alignment using two-layer particle swarm optimization (FTLPSO)