Multiple Sequence Alignment Based Method for Construction of Phylogenetic Trees

Due to the importance of DNA (genetic material) and protein sequences, their comparison becomes the major part of biology. But the presence of large and complex datasets of biological information requires an efficient computational methodology to handle them. The sequence comparison facilitates identification of genes and conserved sequence patterns to infer the evolutionary relationship among different species. This paper uses Multiple Sequence Alignment (MSA) method that aligns multiple sequences at a time to depict phylogeny. The p53 protein sequences of ten different species are loaded from the NCBI (National Center for Biotechnology Information) databank in the FASTA format. Based on the evolutionary distances of these species, two phylogenetic trees are constructed for the two divided parts of this dataset. A single tree is generated by joining two trees using pruning method. To obtain an optimal alignment, each sequence in the pruned alignment is locally aligned with the consensus sequence. The minimum optimal alignment is obtained after performing left and right shift operations.