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Published on: July 14, 2015
PR2ALIGN: a stand-alone software program and a web-server for protein sequence alignment using weighted biochemical
Igor B Kuznetsov1, Michael McDuffie2
1Cancer Research Center and Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, University at Albany, State University of New York, One Discovery Drive, Rensselaer, NY, 12144, USA. ikuznetsov@albany.edu.
PR2ALIGN offers flexible amino acid sequence alignment using user-defined biochemical properties, outperforming traditional fixed substitution matrices. This novel approach enhances alignment quality by weighting specific biochemical characteristics for greater accuracy.
Area of Science:
- Computational molecular biology
- Bioinformatics
- Biochemistry
Background:
- Amino acid sequence alignment is fundamental in computational molecular biology.
- Conventional substitution matrices are fixed and lack biochemical property specificity.
- Existing methods do not differentiate the contribution of specific biochemical properties.
Purpose of the Study:
- To introduce PR2ALIGN, a software tool for flexible, user-specified amino acid sequence alignment.
- To enable alignment based on biochemical properties rather than fixed matrices.
- To improve the quality of pair-wise sequence alignments.
Main Methods:
- PR2ALIGN implements alignment scoring functions based on weighted biochemical properties.
- It measures residue distances using user-defined property profiles.
- The software finds optimal global alignments by minimizing total distance.
Main Results:
- PR2ALIGN produces higher quality pair-wise alignments compared to conventional matrix-based methods.
- The approach allows flexible weighting of biochemical properties for tailored alignments.
- User-specified properties significantly influence alignment outcomes.
Conclusions:
- PR2ALIGN provides a valuable tool for researchers needing flexible, biochemically informed sequence alignment.
- It offers a novel alternative to standard fixed amino acid substitution matrices.
- The software is available as a stand-alone program and web-server.
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