Hall Barry G
Bellingham Research Institute.
Mol Biol Evol. 2008 Aug;25(8):1576-80. doi: 10.1093/molbev/msn103. Epub 2008 May 4.
Multiple sequence alignment is an essential tool in many areas of biological research, and the accuracy of an alignment can strongly affect the accuracy of a downstream application such as phylogenetic analysis, identification of functional motifs, or polymerase chain reaction primer design. The heads or tails (HoT) method (Landan G, Graur D. 2007. Heads or tails: a simple reliability check for multiple sequence alignments. Mol Biol Evol. 24:1380-1383.) assesses the consistency of an alignment by comparing the alignment of a set of sequences with the alignment of the same set of sequences written in reverse order. This study shows that HoT scores and the alignment accuracies are positively correlated, so alignments with higher HoT scores are preferable. However, HoT scores are overestimates of alignment accuracy in general, with the extent of overestimation depending on the method used for multiple sequence alignment.
多序列比对是生物学研究许多领域中的一项重要工具，比对的准确性会强烈影响诸如系统发育分析、功能基序鉴定或聚合酶链反应引物设计等下游应用的准确性。头或尾（HoT）方法（Landan G，Graur D. 2007. 头或尾：多序列比对的一种简单可靠性检查。《分子生物学与进化》。24:1380 - 1383.）通过将一组序列的比对与以相反顺序书写的同一组序列的比对进行比较，来评估比对的一致性。本研究表明，HoT分数与比对准确性呈正相关，因此HoT分数较高的比对更可取。然而，一般来说，HoT分数对比对准确性存在高估，高估程度取决于用于多序列比对的方法。
