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EURASIP Journal on Bioinformatics and Systems Biology
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Aligning Sequences by Minimum Description Length

EURASIP Journal on Bioinformatics and Systems Biology volume 2007, Article number: 72936 (2008) Cite this article

Abstract

This paper presents a new information theoretic framework for aligning sequences in bioinformatics. A transmitter compresses a set of sequences by constructing a regular expression that describes the regions of similarity in the sequences. To retrieve the original set of sequences, a receiver generates all strings that match the expression. An alignment algorithm uses minimum description length to encode and explore alternative expressions; the expression with the shortest encoding provides the best overall alignment. When two substrings contain letters that are similar according to a substitution matrix, a code length function based on conditional probabilities defined by the matrix will encode the substrings with fewer bits. In one experiment, alignments produced with this new method were found to be comparable to alignments from . A second experiment measured the accuracy of the new method on pairwise alignments of sequences from the BAliBASE alignment benchmark.

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  1. Department of Computer and Information Science, University of Oregon, Eugene, OR, 97403, USA

    JohnS Conery

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Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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Conery, J. Aligning Sequences by Minimum Description Length. J Bioinform Sys Biology 2007, 72936 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1155/2007/72936

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