Substitution Matrix - Extensions and Improvements

Extensions and Improvements

Many specialized substitution matrices have been developed that describe the amino acid substitution rates in specific structural or sequence contexts, such as in transmembrane alpha helices, for combinations of secondary structure states and solvent accessibility states, or for local sequence-structure contexts. These context-specific substitution matrices lead to generally improved alignment quality at some cost of speed but are not yet widely used. Recently, sequence context-specific amino acid similarities have been derived that do not need substitution matrices but that rely on a library of sequence contexts instead. Using this idea, a context-specific extension of the popular BLAST program has been demonstrated to achieve a twofold sensitivity improvement for remotely related sequences over BLAST at similar speeds (CS-BLAST).

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