An efficient way of multiple sequence alignment

Sequence alignment is one of the most common tasks in molecular biology or bioinformatics. This paper presents a multiple sequence alignment algorithm based on genetic and ant colony algorithms. The algorithm solves the multiple sequence alignment in three stages. At first, we use a divide-and-conquer strategy to divide the set of sequences into several subsections vertically. Then based on the ant colony optimization, we address a multiple sequence alignment algorithm to align the sequences of each subsection. Finally, through assembling the result of each subsection, we can get the alignment of original sequences. Experimental results show that the algorithm can get high quality solution and reduce the running time.