Multiple Alignment cost application Is there any biological application/case where someone would be interest in the estimated total cost of the alignment between a set of sequences (genes or amino acids) without the aligned sequence itself?
Edit: to clarify by cost I mean the cost function such as the edit distance. I have some ideas for heuristics on the multiple sequences alignment problem (which is intractable) but these would not retrieve the aligned sequence, therefore, I was wondering whether such algorithm would be useful
I'm not a fan personally, but it is context specific. The problem is that it is heading towards optimisation, particularly algorithmic optimisation. If the alignment is the final calculation - that is cool, but the situations are select. It depends how far you want to take it.
The rationale of my skepticism is simple - if an alignment was decided on a 'maximization' criteria, be it likelihood or some other metric - the subsequent calculations based on the alignment, such as phylogenetics Jukes Cantor, Kimura 2 and 3-parameter etc ... we enter circular mathematics. The critiera that defined the alignment is the criteria we are using to perform unrelated post hoc analysis. In truth there is a degree of circular mathematics in any algorithm used to produce an alignment, but we overcome this by optical verification precisely avoid this.
In this sense the alignment is simply to establish homologous amino acid/nucleotide positions for downstream analysis. Thus optical optimisation, whilst cautioned against in every other area of bioinformatics, is considered useful in alignments because of the risk that a logical error in the alignment is amplified in downstream analysis, potentially leading to an erroneous conclusion.
Algorithms are a problem where indels are concerned and aligning across an indel. It is very easy to make errors here and 'optical analysis' would simple introduce a blockwise deletion to avoid the uncertainty, i.e. if you are not sure just chop it out - better to lose data than risk artefacts on an equivocal judgement call.
I'm not saying don't try, I am saying don't look to overstate the applicability of the metric.