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Motivation

In many biological applications local similarity is far more meaningful than global similarity. This is particularly true when long stretches of non-coding DNA are compared, since only small regions within those strings may be related. When comparing protein sequences, local alignment is also critical because proteins from very different families often share the same structural or functional subunits, and local alignment is an appropriate tool for searching such moduls.



Itshack Pe`er
1999-01-03