What is sequence alignment?

Sequence alignment (DNA, RNA, or protein) helps you identify regions of similarity, detect mutations, and infer evolutionary relationships. These similarities can also help predict protein function and guide experimental design.

Types of sequence alignment

• Pairwise alignment: Comparing two sequences at a time
• Multiple alignment: Comparing three or more sequences to detect conserved regions across a group

Why sequence alignment matters?

Sequence alignment helps identify homologous sequences, predict protein structure and function, design PCR primers, and build phylogenetic trees.

Now let’s zoom in on pairwise alignment on the next page.