2 <head><title>Alignment Quality Annotation</title></head>
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4 <p><strong>Alignment Quality Annotation</strong></p>
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5 <p>Alignment Quality is one of the automatically calculated
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6 quantitative alignment
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7 annotations displayed below the columns of a multiple sequence
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8 alignment (and can be used to shade the alignment). It is an ad-hoc
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9 measure of the likelihood of observing the mutations (if any) in a
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10 particular column of the alignment.</p>
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12 More precisely, the quality score is inversely proportional to the
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13 average cost of all pairs of mutations oberved in a particular column
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14 of the alignment - a high alignment quality score for a column would
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15 suggest that there are no mutations, or most mutations observed are
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19 <p><em>The Algorithm</em><br>
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20 The quality score is calculated for each column in an alignment by
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21 summing, for all mutations, the ratio of the two BLOSUM 62 scores for
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22 a mutation pair and each residue's conservered BLOSUM62 score (which
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23 is higher). This valueis normalised for each column, and then plotted
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24 on a scale from 0 to 1.
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27 Multiple alignment algorithms using the BLOSUM 62 substition matrices
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28 should, in theory, maximise alignment quality for an un-gapped
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29 alignment, and locally maximise quality for gapped alignments.
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