Using a Bio-Inspired Algorithm to Resolve the Multiple Sequence Alignment Problem
One of the most challenging tasks in bioinformatics is the resolution of Multiple Sequence Alignment (MSA) problem. It consists in comparing a set of protein or DNA sequences, in aim of predicting their structure and function. This paper introduces a new bio-inspired approach to solve such problem. This approach named BA-MSA is based on Bat Algorithm. Bat Algorithm (BA) is a recent evolutionary algorithm inspired from Bats behavior seeking their prey. The proposed approach includes new mechanism to generate initial population. It consists in generating a guide tree for each solution with progressive approach by varying some parameters. The generated guide tree will be enhanced by Hill-Climbing algorithm. In addition, to deal with the premature convergence of BA, a new restart technique is proposed to introduce more diversification when detecting premature convergence. Balibase 2.0 datasets are used for experiments. The comparison with well-known methods as MSA-GA MSA-GA (w\prealign), ClustalW, and SAGA and recent method (BBOMP) shows the effectiveness of the proposed approach.