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Journal of Computational Biology
A Pairwise Alignment Algorithm Which Favors Clusters of Blocks

To cite this article:
Elodie Nédélec, Thomas Moncion, Elisabeth Gassiat, Bruno Bossard, Guillemette Duchateau-Nguyen, Alain Denise, Michel Termier. Journal of Computational Biology. 2005, 12(1): 33-47. doi:10.1089/cmb.2005.12.33.

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Elodie Nédélec
Laboratoire de Mathématiques, Equipe de Probabilités, Statistique et Modélisation, UMR CNRS 8628, Université Paris-Sud, Orsay.
Thomas Moncion
LRI, Equipe Bioinformatique, UMR CNRS 8621, Université Paris-Sud, Orsay.
LaMI, UMR CNRS 8042, Université d'Evry.
Elisabeth Gassiat
Laboratoire de Mathématiques, Equipe de Probabilités, Statistique et Modélisation, UMR CNRS 8628, Université Paris-Sud, Orsay.
Bruno Bossard
LRI, Equipe Bioinformatique, UMR CNRS 8621, Université Paris-Sud, Orsay.
LIMSI, UPR CNRS 3251, Université Paris-Sud, Orsay.
Guillemette Duchateau-Nguyen
Bioinformatique des Génomes, Institut de Génétique et Microbiologie (IGM), UMR CNRS 8623, Bât.400, Université Paris-Sud, 91405 Orsay Cedex, France.
Alain Denise
LRI, Equipe Bioinformatique, UMR CNRS 8621, Université Paris-Sud, Orsay.
Bioinformatique des Génomes, Institut de Génétique et Microbiologie (IGM), UMR CNRS 8623, Bât.400, Université Paris-Sud, 91405 Orsay Cedex, France.
Michel Termier
Bioinformatique des Génomes, Institut de Génétique et Microbiologie (IGM), UMR CNRS 8623, Bât.400, Université Paris-Sud, 91405 Orsay Cedex, France.

Pairwise sequence alignments aim to decide whether two sequences are related and, if so, to exhibit their related domains. Recent works have pointed out that a significant number of true homologous sequences are missed when using classical comparison algorithms. This is the case when two homologous sequences share several little blocks of homology, too small to lead to a significant score. On the other hand, classical alignment algorithms, when detecting homologies, may fail to recognize all the significant biological signals. The aim of the paper is to give a solution to these two problems. We propose a new scoring method which tends to increase the score of an alignment when "blocks" are detected. This so-called Block-Scoring algorithm, which makes use of dynamic programming, is worth being used as a complementary tool to classical exact alignments methods. We validate our approach by applying it on a large set of biological data. Finally, we give a limit theorem for the score statistics of the algorithm.

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