(1) The Ensembl Group, EMBL, European Bioinformatics Institute, Wellcome Trust Genome Campus, Hinxton, Cambridge, CB10 1SD, UK
Abstract:
Background
Exhaustive methods of sequence alignment are accurate but slow, whereas heuristic approaches run quickly, but their complexity makes them more difficult to implement. We introduce bounded sparse dynamic programming (BSDP) to allow rapid approximation to exhaustive alignment. This is used within a framework whereby the alignment algorithms are described in terms of their underlying model, to allow automated development of efficient heuristic implementations which may be applied to a general set of sequence comparison problems.