MULTAN: a program to align multiple DNA sequences.

I describe a computer program which can align a large number of nucleic acid sequences with one another. The program uses an heuristic, iterative algorithm which has been tested extensively, and is found to produce useful alignments of a variety of sequence families. The algorithm is fast enough to be practical for the analysis of large number of sequences, and is implemented in a program which contains a variety of other functions to facilitate the analysis of the aligned result.