A sequence alignment in bioinformatics is a way of arranging DNA, RNA, or protein primary sequences to emphasize their regions of similarity, which may indicate functional or evolutionary relationships between the genes or proteins in the query. Aligned sequences are typically written with their characters (generally representing amino acids or nucleotides) in columns into which gaps are inserted so that residues with identical or similar characters are aligned in the successive columns. If two sequences in an alignment share a common ancestor, mismatches can be interpreted as point mutations and gaps as indels (that is, insertion or deletion mutations) introduced in one or both lineages in the time since they diverged from one another. In protein sequence alignment, the degree of similarity between amino acids occupying a particular position in the sequence can be interpreted as a rough measure of how conserved a particular region or sequence motif is among lineages.

Read the rest of this article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sequence_alignment

_______________________________ Today's selected anniversaries:

475: Flavius Orestes took control of Ravenna, the capital of the Western Roman Empire, forcing Emperor Julius Nepos to flee. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orestes_(Roman_soldier))

1565: Pedro Menéndez de Avilés founded St. Augustine in Spanish Florida, the oldest continually occupied European settlement in the continental United States. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Augustine%2C_Florida)

1845: The first issue of Scientific American was published. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_American)

1850: The romantic opera Lohengrin by Richard Wagner was first performed in Weimar, Germany. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lohengrin_(opera))

1963: Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Have_a_Dream)

_____________________ Wikiquote of the day:

"Who is the happiest of men? He who values the merits of others, and in their pleasure takes joy, even as though 'twere his own." -- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Johann_Wolfgang_von_Goethe)