A quantum-inspired genetic algorithm based on probabilistic coding for multiple sequence alignment.

Quantum parallelism arises from the ability of a quantum memory register to exist in a superposition of base states. Since the number of possible base states is 2(n), where n is the number of qubits in the quantum memory register, one operation on a quantum computer performs what an exponential number of operations on a classical computer performs. The power of quantum algorithms comes from taking advantages of quantum parallelism. Quantum algorithms are exponentially faster than classical algorithms. Genetic optimization algorithms are stochastic search algorithms which are used to search large, nonlinear spaces where expert knowledge is lacking or difficult to encode. QGMALIGN--a probabilistic coding based quantum-inspired genetic algorithm for multiple sequence alignment is presented. A quantum rotation gate as a mutation operator is used to guide the quantum state evolution. Six genetic operators are designed on the coding basis to improve the solution during the evolutionary process. The experimental results show that QGMALIGN can compete with the popular methods, such as CLUSTALX and SAGA, and performs well on the presenting biological data. Moreover, the addition of genetic operators to the quantum-inspired algorithm lowers the cost of overall running time.