Question

Which of the following is untrue about iterative approach?

(a) The iterative approach is based on the idea that an optimal solution can be found by repeatedly modifying existing suboptimal solutions

(b) Because the order of the sequences used for alignment is different in each iteration

(c) This method is also heuristic in nature and does not have guarantees for finding the optimal alignment

(d) This method is not based on heuristic methods

I had been asked this question in an international level competition.

This intriguing question comes from Heuristic Algorithms topic in portion Multiple Sequence Alignment of Bioinformatics

Answer 1

Correct option is (d) This method is not based on heuristic methods

For explanation: This method is based on heuristic methods. The procedure starts by producing a low-quality alignment and gradually improves it by iterative realignment through well-defined procedures until no more improvements in the alignment scores can be achieved.