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How well do alignment methods work?

The pair-wise sequence alignment algorithms outlined in the previous sections are guaranteed to produce a mathematically optimal alignment for two sequences given the chosen pair-score matrix (e.g. BLOSUM62) and gap-penalty function. However, the fact that an alignment is optimal for the matrix and penalty, does not mean that the alignment is biologically or structurally meaningful. One can take any two sequences and optimally align them, but an optimal alignment of, say, a globin (an all-$\alpha$ 


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