A weighting system and aigorithm for aligning many phylogenetically related sequences

Most multiple sequence alignment programs explicitly or implicity try to optimize some score associated with the resulting alignment. Although the sum-of-pairs score is currently most widely used, it is inappropriate when the phylogenetic relationships among the sequences to be aligned are not evenly distributed, since the contributions of densely populated groups dominate those of minor members. This paper proposes an iterative multiple sequence alignment method which optimizes a weighted sum-of-pairs score, in which the weights given to individual sequence pairs are adjusted to compensate for the biased contributions. A simple method that rapidly calculates such a set of weights for a given phylogenetic tree is presented. The multiple sequence alignment is refined through partitioning and realignment restricted to the edges of the tree. Under this restriction, profile-based fast and rigorous group-to-group alignment is achieved at each iteration, rendering the overall computational cost virtually identical to that using an unweighted score. Consistency of nearly 90% was attained between structural and sequence alignments of multiple divergent globins, confirming the effectiveness of this strategy in improving the quality of multiple sequence alignment.