Related Experiment Video
Updated: Aug 19, 2026

A Practical Guide to Phylogenetics for Nonexperts
Published on: February 5, 2014
A consensus program for molecular sequences
1Department of Computer Science, Memorial University of Newfoundland, St John's, Canada.
Abstract:
Although molecular biologists often calculate consensus sequences from aligned DNA or protein sequences, relatively little is known about the properties of many of the consensus methods being used. Consequently, we wrote a program, CONSENSUS, to analyze and compare methods of calculating a consensus result (a base, an ambiguity code or a subset of codes) at a position in an aligned set of molecular sequences. The program supports alphabets of up to four symbols (e.g. [R,Y] or [A,C,G,T]). The program's output makes it suitable for exploratory data analysis or for selecting values of thresholds or confidence levels in consensus methods having such parameters.
Related Concept Videos
Evolutionary Relationships through Genome Comparisons
Multi-species Conserved Sequences
Although the genome of each species varies greatly from each other, a few sequences are highly conserved. Such conserved DNA...
Next-generation Sequencing
Next-Generation Sequencing Methods
Although all next-generation methods use different technologies, they all share a set of standard features.
RNA-seq
Before the discovery of RNA-seq, microarray-based methods and Sanger sequencing were used for transcriptome analysis. However, while microarray-based...
Modern Molecular Taxonomy
Applications of Molecular Taxonomy

