Protein Alignment in Practice
• Analysis (worst-case)
– Time O(n2)
– Space O(n2)
• We don’t want just the cost
– We also want to know the
alignment (the path)
– Can walk “backward”
through the table to find it
– Can use M[i,j] to remember
choice made for C[i,j]
• It is possible to bring the
space down to O(n) with a
more complicated algorithm
– This includes constructing
and reporting the path
• Aligning 2 proteins is easy,
but finding the best score
when aligning multiple
proteins is hard (exponential
in number of proteins)
– NP-complete
CS409 - Spring 2000
16