Question

Which of the following does not describe k-tuple methods?

(a) k-tuple methods are best known for their implementation in the database search tools FASTA and the BLAST family

(b) They are also known as words methods

(c) They are basically heuristic methods to find local alignment

(d) They are useful in small scale databases

The question was asked by my school principal while I was bunking the class.

I'd like to ask this question from Local Sequence Alignment in portion Sequence Alignment of Bioinformatics

Answer 1

The correct answer is (d) They are useful in small scale databases

Explanation: k-tuple or word methods are especially useful in large-scale database searches where a large proportion of stored sequences will have essentially no significant match with the query sequence. They are heuristic methods that are not guaranteed to find an optimal alignment solution but are significantly more efficient than Smith-Waterman algorithm.