Question

Which of the following is untrue about DCA?

(a) It stands for Divide-and-Conquer Alignment

(b) It works by breaking each of the sequences into two smaller sections

(c) The breaking points during the process are determined based on regional similarity of the sequences

(d) If the sections are not short enough, further divisions are restricted as well

This question was addressed to me in a job interview.

Asked question is from Exhaustive Algorithms topic in portion Multiple Sequence Alignment of Bioinformatics

Answer 1

Right choice is (d) If the sections are not short enough, further divisions are restricted as well

The best I can explain: This is a web-based program that is in fact semi exhaustive because certain steps of computation are reduced to heuristics. If the sections are not short enough, further divisions are carried out. When the lengths of the sequences reach a predefined threshold, dynamic programming is applied for aligning each set of subsequences. The resulting short alignments are joined together head to tail to yield a multiple alignment of the entire length of all sequences.