European Molecular Biology Laboratory, Meyerhofstrasse 1, 69012 Heidelberg, Germany.
Bioinformatics. 2010 Jan 15;26(2):263-5. doi: 10.1093/bioinformatics/btp651. Epub 2009 Nov 19.
Multiple sequence alignment (MSA) is a central tool in most modern biology studies. However, despite generations of valuable tools, human experts are still able to improve automatically generated MSAs. In an effort to automatically identify the most reliable MSA for a given protein family, we propose a very simple protocol, named AQUA for 'Automated quality improvement for multiple sequence alignments'. Our current implementation relies on two alignment programs (MUSCLE and MAFFT), one refinement program (RASCAL) and one assessment program (NORMD), but other programs could be incorporated at any of the three steps.
AQUA is implemented in Tcl/Tk and runs in command line on all platforms. The source code is available under the GNU GPL license. Source code, README and Supplementary data are available at http://www.bork.embl.de/Docu/AQUA.
多序列比对（MSA）是大多数现代生物学研究的核心工具。然而，尽管经过了几代有价值的工具，人类专家仍然能够改进自动生成的 MSA。为了自动识别给定蛋白质家族中最可靠的 MSA，我们提出了一种非常简单的协议，名为 AQUA，代表“多序列比对的自动质量改进”。我们目前的实现依赖于两个比对程序（MUSCLE 和 MAFFT）、一个精修程序（RASCAL）和一个评估程序（NORMD），但其他程序可以在这三个步骤中的任何一个中加入。
AQUA 是用 Tcl/Tk 编写的，在所有平台上都可以在命令行运行。源代码在 GNU GPL 许可证下可用。源代码、自述文件和补充数据可在 http://www.bork.embl.de/Docu/AQUA 获得。
