Bioinformatics:Multiple sequence alignment: ClustalW

Bioinformatics:Multiple sequence alignment: ClustalW

What is multiple sequence alignment:

Multiple sequence alignment is an alignment of more than one (Protein or Nucleic Acid "DNA & RNA") sequence.

What's ClustalW:

ClustalW is a large and complex program for multiple sequence alignments.

Why use ClustalW:

As we said before ClustalW is for multiple sequence alignments which are very important in bioinformatics field and especially studying sequences, by doing a multiple sequence alignment for protein sequences for example we can extract these very useful informations:

1- Conserved sequence regions.

2- Knowing which are active sites and which are not.

3- Predicting protein function.

4- Helping in predicting protein structure.

5- Identify protein family or new members.

6- Calculating trees to know proteins relationship (Distances)...etc.

You can find ClustalW at EBI and you can access it from HERE.