Question

It is not known whether the Gumble distribution applies equally well to gapped alignments.

(a) True

(b) False

I have been asked this question by my school principal while I was bunking the class.

My doubt stems from Statistical Significance of Sequence Alignment in portion Pairwise Sequence Alignment of Bioinformatics

Answer 1

Right answer is (a) True

For explanation I would say: The statistics in the test were derived from ungapped local sequence alignments. Hence, it is not known whether the Gumble distribution applies equally well to gapped alignments. However, for all practical purposes, it is reasonable to assume that scores for gapped alignments essentially fit the same distribution. A frequently used software program for assessing statistical significance of a pairwise alignment is the PRSS program.