Introduction to Multiple Sequence Alignment

Thursday 17th February 2011

EMBL Hamburg, Germany

Aidan Budd and Toby Gibson

Sequence alignment lies at the core of many bioinformatics tools - particularly in the field of protein bioinformatics. Thus, an awareness of:

the different kinds of biological interpretation of alignments
common tools that use and apply alignments
common sources of error associated with building and interpreting alignments

are all useful for biologists who need to critically interpret alignments, and calculate/build them for their own analyses

This half-day course aims to provide an introduction to these issues for biologists who either have no (or limited) previous experience using alignments.

Program

12.00 - 13.00	Introduction Alternative interpretations of alignments structural evolutionary situations where interpretations are not equivalent
13.00 - 14.00	Lunch
14.00 - 15.30	Examining multiple sequence alignments (MSAs) A work-flow for building an MSA from A-Z
15.30 - 16.00	Coffee
16.00 - 17.30	A work-flow for building an MSA from A-Z (cont.) Features of difficult-to-align sequence sets