title: DIALIGN: finding local similarities by multiple sequence alignment.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  DIALIGN is a new method for pairwise as well as multiple alignment of nucleic acid and protein sequences. While standard alignment programs rely on comparing single residues and imposing gap penalties, DIALIGN constructs alignments by comparing whole segments of the sequences. No gap penalty is employed. This point of view is especially adequate if sequences are not globally related, but share only local similarities, as is the case in genomic DNA sequences and in many protein families.
  
  
  RESULTS
  Using four different data sets, we show that DIALIGN is able correctly to align conserved motifs in protein sequences. Alignments produced by DIALIGN are compared systematically to the results of five other alignment programs.
  
  
  BACKGROUND
  DIALIGN is available to the scientific community free of charge for non-commercial use. Executables for various UNIX platforms including LINUX can be downloaded at http://www.gsf.de/biodv/dialign.html
  
  
  BACKGROUND
  werner, morgenstern@gsf.de
authors.affiliation: GSF-National Research Center for Environment and Health, Institute of Biomathematics and Biometry, Institute of Mammalian Genetics, Ingolstädter Landstr. 1, 85764 Neuherberg, Germany.
authors.forename: B
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Morgenstern
authors.forename: K
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Frech
authors.forename: A
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Dress
authors.forename: T
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Werner
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D000595:Amino Acid Sequence; D019295:Computational Biology / Q000379:methods*; D017124:Conserved Sequence; D008969:Molecular Sequence Data; D016415:Sequence Alignment / Q000379:methods*; D017421:Sequence Analysis / Q000379:methods; D017422:Sequence Analysis, DNA / Q000379:methods; D017386:Sequence Homology, Amino Acid; D012986:Software Validation