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8.14 Consider Using Ungapped Alignment for BLASTX, TBLASTN, and TBLASTX

The first versions of BLAST produced strictly ungapped alignments but were still very useful. Although gapped alignment has some advantages, it may produce surprising results. When running the translating BLAST programs (BLASTX, TBLASTN, and TBLASTX), you generally look for protein coding regions and therefore don't expect to see stop codons. Stop codons are very frequent in alignments from these programs, and it isn't possible to eliminate stop codons by simply making their scores highly negative. In standard alignment algorithms (see Chapter 3), no match score can be more negative than the cost of two gaps. In Figure 8-6, all stop codon scores are given a value of -999 (for more details, see Chapter 10). Notice how two alternating gaps skip over the stops in this TBLASTX alignment between two noncoding sequences (this is a WU-BLAST alignment; NCBI-BLAST is always ungapped for TBLASTX). You can avoid stop codons only by using ungapped alignment in addition to highly negative stop scores. Doing so segments the alignment in Figure 8-6 into three short alignments with insignificant E-values.

Figure 8-6. Alternating gaps skip over highly negative scores
figs/blst_0806.gif

Figure 8-7 demonstrates another feature of gapped alignment: alignments may extend far beyond the end of an exon because gapped extension is generally less specific. This is especially annoying in genomes with short introns in which gapped alignments can extend between nonadjacent exons and obscure intervening introns and exons. To reduce these lengthy extensions, decrease X, increase the gap extension cost, select a more stringent scoring matrix, or use ungapped alignment.

Figure 8-7. Extension is sometimes excessive: the real exon region is boxed in this BLASTX alignment
figs/blst_0807.gif
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