PSAR: Measuring Multiple Sequence Alignment Reliability by Probabilistic Sampling: (Extended Abstract)

Abstract

Multiple sequence alignment (MSA), which is of fundamental importance for comparative genomics, is a difficult problem and error-prone. Therefore, it is essential to measure the reliability of the alignments and incorporate it into downstream analyses. Many studies have been conducted to find the extent, cause and effect of the alignment errors [4], and to heuristically estimate the quality of alignments without using the true alignment, which is unknown [2]. However, it is still unclear whether the heuristically chosen measures are general enough to take into account all alignment errors. In this paper, we present a new alignment reliability score, called PSAR (Probabilistic Sampling-based Alignment Reliability) score.