Question

The rigorous dynamic programming method is normally not used for database searching because it is slow and computationally expensive.

(a) True

(b) False

I have been asked this question by my college professor while I was bunking the class.

This interesting question is from Database Searching with the Smith topic in division Database Similarity Searching of Bioinformatics

Answer 1

The correct option is (a) True

Explanation: Heuristics such as BLAST and FASTA are developed for faster speed. However, the heuristic methods are limited in sensitivity and are not guaranteed to find the optimal alignment. They often fail to find alignment for distantly related sequences.