New age for alignment-free methods for sequence analyses

Abstract

Progress in a wide range of fields ranging from population genetics to precision medicine may be attributed to availability of big biological data. Alignment-free sequence comparison is the methodology of choice in data-intensive applications given that it is significantly faster and requires less resources compared to traditional sequence comparison based on pairwise or multiple sequence alignment. The symbiosis of alignment-free methods with machine learning is a paradigm of new age in bioinformatics, as it ensures the much needed boost to quicken the complex predictions on large datasets, particularly of molecules with low sequence identity. In this talk, I will present two stories in which I will describe approaches to predict functional consequences of gene variants and imperfect tandem repeats in protein sequences.