A Multi-Objective approach to the optimization of Multiple Sequence Alignment (MSA)

Multiple Sequence Alignment (MSA) is one of the main topics in the bioinformatics domain, consists in finding an optimal alignment for three or more biological sequences with the number maximum of conserved zones or totally aligned columns. Different scores to assess the quality of the alignments have been proposed, so the problem can be formulated and resolved as a Multi-Objective Optimization Problem (MOP). For this reason we have carried out a perfomanced study resolving the MSA problem under a multi-objective approach, considering two popular metrics as objectives to be optimized: The weighted Sum-Of-Pairs with affine gap penalties (wSOP) and the Totally Aligned Columns (TC), with three algorithms from the state-of- the-art of Multi-Objective Optimization: NSGAII, SPEA2 and MOCell. Our experiments reveals that the classic metaheuristic NSGA-II provides the best overall performance resolving some problems provided by the benchmark BAliBASE (v3.0), under a multi-objective and biological approach.