Question

Given a multiple alignment of three sequences, the sum of scores is calculated as the sum of the dissimilarity scores of every pair of sequences at each position.

(a) True

(b) False

I had been asked this question during a job interview.

My question is based upon Exhaustive Algorithms in chapter Multiple Sequence Alignment of Bioinformatics

Answer 1

Correct choice is (b) False

For explanation I would say: Given a multiple alignment of three sequences, the sum of scores is calculated as the sum of the similarity scores of every pair of sequences at each position. The scoring is based on the BLOSUM62 matrix. If the total score for the alignment is 5, which means that the alignment is 25 = 32 times more likely to occur among homologous sequences than by random chance.