A Novel Method for Multiple Sequence Alignment Using Morphing Techniques

We review a novel computational method for Multiple Sequence Alignment (MSA), a fundamental problem in computational biology. In contrast to other known approaches, our method searches for an optimal alignment - structurally and evolutionarily by inserting or deleting gaps from a set of initial candidates in an efficient manner. Our method called a Universal Partitioning Search (UPS) approach for MSA uses graphical morphism to guarantee that the scores of the alignment candidates are always improved after each particle swarm optimization iteration.