A new quantum cuckoo search algorithm for multiple sequence alignment

Abstract

Multiple sequence alignment (MSA) is one of the major problems that can be encountered in the bioinformatics field. MSA consists in aligning a set of biological sequences to extract the similarities between them. Unfortunately, this problem has been shown to be NP-hard. In this article, a new algorithm was proposed to deal with this problem; it is based on a quantum-inspired cuckoo search algorithm. The other feature of the proposed approach is the use of a randomized progressive alignment method based on a hybrid global/local pairwise algorithm to construct the initial population. The results obtained by this hybridization are very encouraging and show the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed solution.