Multiple Gene Order Alignment

Multiple alignment of genomic sequences have been studied in the past. The focus of early works has been on pair wise and multiple alignment of individual genes. More recent works have studied the pair wise and multiple alignment and rearrangement of gene order sequences. The previous approaches to gene-order analysis were largely based on break-point analysis or gene rearrangements. We describe an algorithm for alignment of gene order sequences based on a graph based consensus method. The algorithm can be applied to align 2 or more gene order sequences and obtain the ancestor gene order sequence. The algorithm argues for a potentially simpler approach for multiple alignment of gene orders based on a notion of precedence. The algorithm can also be implemented in parallel to further increase its speed