title: Approximations to profile score distributions.
abstract: Profiles, which are summaries of multiple alignments of a sequence family, are used to find new instances of the family in databases. In this paper, we study the maximum score M obtained when the profile is aligned without indels at all possible positions of a random sequence. The main theorem gives an approximation to the distribution function of M with an explicit bound on the error. This theorem implies that M has a limiting extreme value distribution.
authors.affiliation: Department of Mathematics, University of Southern California, Los Angeles 90089-1113, USA.
authors.forename: L
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Goldstein
authors.forename: M S
authors.initials: MS
authors.lastname: Waterman
mesh_terms: D003198:Computer Simulation; D016208:Databases, Factual; D008433:Mathematics; D015233:Models, Statistical; D016415:Sequence Alignment / Q000379:methods*; D017385:Sequence Homology; D012689:Sequence Homology, Nucleic Acid