Question

_______ analyzed the distribution of scores among 100 vertebrate nucleic acid sequences and compared these scores with randomized sequences prepared in different ways.

(a) Lipman, in 1984

(b) Batalov, in 1964

(c) Waterman, in 1987

(d) Lipman, in 1967

This question was addressed to me in my homework.

The question is from Assessing the Significance of Sequence Alignments topic in division Sequence Alignment of Bioinformatics

Answer 1

The correct answer is (a) Lipman, in 1984

The explanation: When the randomized sequences were prepared by shuffling the sequence to conserve base composition, as was done by Dayhoff and others, the standard deviation was approximately one-third less than the distribution of scores of the natural sequences. Thus, natural sequences are more variable than randomized ones, and using such randomized sequences for a significance test may lead to an overestimation of the significance.