title: Simple chained guide trees give high-quality protein multiple sequence alignments.
abstract: Guide trees are used to decide the order of sequence alignment in the progressive multiple sequence alignment heuristic. These guide trees are often the limiting factor in making large alignments, and considerable effort has been expended over the years in making these quickly or accurately. In this article we show that, at least for protein families with large numbers of sequences that can be benchmarked with known structures, simple chained guide trees give the most accurate alignments. These also happen to be the fastest and simplest guide trees to construct, computationally. Such guide trees have a striking effect on the accuracy of alignments produced by some of the most widely used alignment packages. There is a marked increase in accuracy and a marked decrease in computational time, once the number of sequences goes much above a few hundred. This is true, even if the order of sequences in the guide tree is random.
authors.affiliation: Conway Institute of Biomolecular and Biomedical Research, and UCD School of Medicine and Medical Science, University College Dublin, Dublin 4, Ireland.
authors.forename: Kieran
authors.identifier: http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7530-2965
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Boyce
authors.affiliation: Conway Institute of Biomolecular and Biomedical Research, and UCD School of Medicine and Medical Science, University College Dublin, Dublin 4, Ireland.
authors.forename: Fabian
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Sievers
authors.affiliation: Conway Institute of Biomolecular and Biomedical Research, and UCD School of Medicine and Medical Science, University College Dublin, Dublin 4, Ireland des.higgins@ucd.ie.
authors.forename: Desmond G
authors.initials: DG
authors.lastname: Higgins
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D003577:Cytochrome P-450 Enzyme System / Q000737:chemistry; D030562:Databases, Protein; D011506:Proteins / Q000737:chemistry*; D012015:Reference Standards; D016415:Sequence Alignment / Q000379:methods*; D020539:Sequence Analysis, Protein; D012984:Software
chemical_list: D011506:Proteins; D003577:Cytochrome P-450 Enzyme System
keywords: Clustal; Mafft; Muscle; PFAM