title: Interpreting consensus sequences based on plurality rule.
abstract: Our goal is to help researchers interpret the results of a function, based on the concept of plurality rule, that calculates a consensus of a profile of molecular bases. By expressing the plurality rule function as a composition of simpler functions, we obtain both an algorithm to calculate the consensus result and an upper bound on the number of nonequivalent results. Consequently, when used to analyze molecular sequences such as DNA or RNA, the plurality rule function yields at most 48 nonequivalent consensus results. For problems of reasonable size, we describe an algorithm to calculate the probability that each consensus result would occur if the bases were equally likely to appear at every position of the plurality rule function's input profile.
authors.affiliation: Department of Computer Science, Memorial University of Newfoundland, St. John's, Canada.
authors.forename: W H
authors.initials: WH
authors.lastname: Day
authors.forename: F R
authors.initials: FR
authors.lastname: McMorris
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D001483:Base Sequence; D016384:Consensus Sequence; D008957:Models, Genetic; D008969:Molecular Sequence Data; D011336:Probability