Patrick Audley // My First Paper

This paper has been years in the making, and though I was only involved towards the end it was still a lot of fun. The paper evaluates several different methods for performing multiple sequence alignments (MSA). MSAs are used in biology to determine how similar several genes or proteins are. This is useful, for instance, to determine how closely related genes are among different species. Alternatively, MSAs can be used to compare different genes or proteins within a single species to find similar functions. MSAs are useful in other scientific fields, such as linguistics, where you need to determine the similarity between a number of sequences of things (like sentences of words).