PMID:1669287

Citation	Henikoff, S (1991) Playing with blocks: some pitfalls of forcing multiple alignments. New Biol. 3:1148-54
Abstract	Block alignments of multiple amino acid sequences are useful representations of regions thought to share common ancestry and function. Often the block alignments are motivated by the expectation that a protein of interest is similar in function to members of a family of proteins. However, when alignments are forced by using ad hoc methods, it is often difficult to decide whether the proposed relationship is valid. Visual examination can be deceptive, especially when alignments are not carried out in the context of controls subjected to similar procedures. Even computer-aided methods can be misleading when biases are introduced. To illustrate some of the problems that can arise, a few examples from the literature are analyzed. It is concluded that when standard methods fail to find an interesting block alignment unaided by human intervention, then the result should be regarded with caution.
Links	PubMed
Keywords	Amino Acid Sequence; Amino Acyl-tRNA Synthetases/genetics; Animals; Bias (Epidemiology); Carboxypeptidase B; Carboxypeptidases/genetics; Carrier Proteins/genetics; DNA-Binding Proteins/genetics; Databases, Factual; Escherichia coli; Microfilament Proteins; Molecular Sequence Data; Nuclear Proteins; Pattern Recognition, Automated; Polymerase Chain Reaction; Proteins/genetics; RNA Replicase/genetics; Sequence Homology, Nucleic Acid
edit table

Significance

You can help EcoliWiki by summarizing why this paper is useful

You can help Ecoliwiki by describing the useful materials (strains, plasmids, antibodies, etc) described in this paper.

Add links to pages that link here (e.g. gene, product, method pages)

See Help:References for how to manage references in EcoliWiki.