Sequence Analysis Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words

Sequence Analysis - Essay Example Sequences alignment is one of the pillars of bioinformatics and is the process of comparing two or more sequences to deduce whether they are related to one another. In this comparison, one may draw inferences as to whether two proteins for instance have similar function, contains similar structural motifs which are the conserved sequences with a protein sequence that correspond to structural or functional regions. Sequence alignment is used to determine whether two or more sequence display sufficient similarity. This similarity must be sufficient to infer homology. Usually in sequence alignment; two terms are prominent, homology and similarity. Similarity is a measure and can be measured for instance the percentage identity and homology can never be measured and it is the conclusion drawn from the similarity data to infer whether any two genes or gene product being compared share a common evolutionary history. Homology may be defined as a putative conclusion which is reached after examining optimal alignment between two sequences and assessment of their similarity. Homology between two sequences is not measured in degrees and it implies evolutionary relationship. Homology may be classified as either orthologs which are genes separate by speciation event (s) and they may have similar structural domains and function. Paralogs sequences may be genes separated by duplications events and may provide insight on novel genes arising from duplication event adapting to modified cellular functions. Sequence alignment may either be local or global. Global sequence alignment compares two sequences along their entire length whereas local sequence alignment finds the most similar regions in two sequences being aligned. Albeit slow the dynamic programming algorithms are more accurate compared to the heuristic algorithms, FASTA and BLAST (Polyanovsky, et al., 2011). BLAST and FASTA algorithms are the