Bioinformatics Advance Access originally published online on March 1, 2007
Bioinformatics 2007 23(9):1073-1079; doi:10.1093/bioinformatics/btm076
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COBALT: constraint-based alignment tool for multiple protein sequences
National Center for Biotechnology Information, National Institutes of Health, Department of Health and Human Services, Bldg. 38A, Room 10–03N, 8600 Rockville Pike, Bethesda, MD 20894, USA
*To whom correspondence should be addressed.
| Abstract |
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Motivation: A tool that simultaneously aligns multiple protein sequences, automatically utilizes information about protein domains, and has a good compromise between speed and accuracy will have practical advantages over current tools.
Results: We describe COBALT, a constraint based alignment tool that implements a general framework for multiple alignment of protein sequences. COBALT finds a collection of pairwise constraints derived from database searches, sequence similarity and user input, combines these pairwise constraints, and then incorporates them into a progressive multiple alignment. We show that using constraints derived from the conserved domain database (CDD) and PROSITE protein-motif database improves COBALT's alignment quality. We also show that COBALT has reasonable runtime performance and alignment accuracy comparable to or exceeding that of other tools for a broad range of problems.
Availability: COBALT is included in the NCBI C++ toolkit. A Linux executable for COBALT, and CDD and PROSITE data used is available at: ftp://ftp.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pub/agarwala/cobalt
Contact: richa{at}helix.nih.gov
Associate Editor: Charlie Hodgman
Received on September 15, 2006; revised on January 23, 2007; accepted on February 26, 2007
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