A minimum reporting standard for multiple sequence alignments
Multiple sequence alignments (MSAs) play a pivotal role in studies of molecular sequence data, but nobody has developed a minimum reporting standard (MRS) to quantify the completeness of MSAs in terms of completely-specified nucleotides or amino acids. We present an MRS that relies on four simple completeness metrics. The metrics are implemented in AliStat, a program developed to support the MRS. A survey of published MSAs illustrates the benefits and unprecedented transparency offered by the MRS.
bioinformatics↗