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The Maximum Weight Trace Alignment Merging Problem

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Book cover Algorithms for Computational Biology (AlCoB 2021)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNBI,volume 12715))

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Abstract

The Maximum Weight Trace (MWT) is an optimization problem for multiple sequence alignment that takes a set of sequences and weights on pairs of letters from different sequences and seeks a multiple sequence alignment that maximizes the sum of the weights for the pairs of letters that appear in the same column. MWT was introduced by Kececioglu in 1993, then proven to be NP-hard, and heuristics and exact solutions for MWT developed. Unfortunately none of the MWT methods are scalable to even moderate-sized datasets. Here we propose the MWT-AM problem (MWT for Alignment Merging), an extension of the MWT problem to be used in a divide-and-conquer setting, where we seek a merged alignment of a set of disjoint alignments that optimizes the MWT score. We present variations of GCM (the Graph Clustering Merger, originally developed for the MAGUS multiple sequence alignment method) that are specifically designed for MWT-AM. We show that the best of these variants, which we refer to as GCM-MWT, perform well for the MWT-AM criterion. We explore GCM-MWT in comparison to other methods for merging alignments, T-coffee and MAFFT–merge, and find that GCM-MWT produces more accurate merged alignments. GCM-MWT is available in open source form at https://github.com/vlasmirnov/MAGUS.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported in part by NSF ABI-1458652 to TW and by the Debra and Ira Cohen fellowship to VS.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois, 201 N. Goodwin Avenue, Urbana, IL, 61801, USA

    Paul Zaharias, Vladimir Smirnov & Tandy Warnow

Authors
  1. Paul Zaharias
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  2. Vladimir Smirnov
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  3. Tandy Warnow
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Tandy Warnow .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Rovira i Virgili University, Tarragona, Spain

    Carlos Martín-Vide

  2. University of Extremadura, Cáceres, Spain

    Miguel A. Vega-Rodríguez

  3. University of Montana, Missoula, MT, USA

    Travis Wheeler

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Zaharias, P., Smirnov, V., Warnow, T. (2021). The Maximum Weight Trace Alignment Merging Problem. In: Martín-Vide, C., Vega-Rodríguez, M.A., Wheeler, T. (eds) Algorithms for Computational Biology. AlCoB 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12715. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74432-8_12

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74432-8_12

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-74431-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-74432-8

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