Comparative Analysis of Nucleic Acid and Protein Primary Structures

The review considers the original works on the primary structure of biopolymers carried out from 1983 to 2003. Most works were supported by the Russian program Human Genome and earlier similar Russian programs. Little-known publications of 1983–1993 and recent unpublished results are described in detail. In the field of genome comparisons, these concern the OWEN hierarchic algorithm aligning syntenic regions of two genome sequences. The resulting global alignment is obtained as an ordered chain of local similarities. Alignment of megabase sequences takes several minutes. The concept of local similarity conflicts is generalized to multiple comparisons. New algorithms aligning protein sequences are described and compared with the Smith–Waterman algorithm, which is now most accurate. The ANCHOR hierarchic algorithm generates alignments of much the same accuracy and is twice as rapid as the Smith–Waterman one. The STRSWer algorithm takes into account the secondary structures of proteins under study. With the secondary structures predicted using the PSI-PRED software for pairs of proteins having 10–30% similarity, the average accuracy of alignments generated by STRSWer is 15% higher than that achieved with the Smith–Waterman algorithm.