Question

Waterman, in1989, provided a set of means and standard deviations of global alignment scores between random DNA sequences, using mismatch and gap penalties that produce a linear increase in score with _______ a distinguishing feature of global alignments.

(a) alignment score

(b) sequence score

(c) sequence length

(d) scoring system

I got this question in an online quiz.

My question is based upon Assessing the Significance of Sequence Alignments in chapter Sequence Alignment of Bioinformatics

Answer 1

Correct answer is (c) sequence length

To elaborate: In the algorithm provided by Waterman, the score of the alignment of random or unrelated sequences grows proportionally to the length of the sequences. However, these values are of limited use because they are based on a simple gap scoring system.