source: branches/nameserver/GDE/CLUSTALW/clustalw.ms

This is just an ASCII text version of the manuscript describing
Clustal W, without the figures.  It was published:

Nucleic Acids Research, 22(22):4673-4680.



CLUSTAL W: improving the sensitivity of progressive multiple 
sequence alignment through sequence weighting, position specific 
gap penalties and weight matrix choice.



Julie D. Thompson, Desmond G. Higgins1 and Toby J. Gibson*

European Molecular Biology Laboratory
Postfach 102209
Meyerhofstrasse 1
D-69012 Heidelberg
Germany


Phone:          +49-6221-387398
Fax:            +49-6221-387306
E-mail:         Gibson@EMBL-Heidelberg.DE
                Des.Higgins@EBI.AC.UK
                Thompson@EMBL-Heidelberg.DE


Keywords:       Multiple alignment, phylogenetic tree, weight matrix, gap
                penalty, dynamic programming, sequence weighting.


1 Current address: 
European Bioinformatics Institute
Hinxton Hall
Hinxton
Cambridge CB10 1RQ
UK.

* To whom correspondence should be addressed


ABSTRACT

The sensitivity of the commonly used progressive multiple sequence 
alignment method has been greatly improved for the alignment of divergent 
protein sequences.   Firstly, individual weights are assigned to each sequence 
in a partial alignment in order to downweight near-duplicate sequences and 
upweight the most divergent ones.   Secondly, amino acid substitution 
matrices are varied at different alignment stages according to the divergence 
of the sequences to be aligned.    Thirdly, residue specific gap penalties and 
locally reduced gap penalties in hydrophilic regions encourage new gaps in 
potential loop regions rather than regular secondary structure.   Fourthly, 
positions in early alignments where gaps have been opened receive locally 
reduced gap penalties to encourage the opening up of new gaps at these 
positions.  These modifications are incorporated into a new program, 
CLUSTAL W which is freely available.  


INTRODUCTION

The simultaneous alignment of many nucleotide or amino acid sequences is 
now an essential tool in molecular biology.  Multiple alignments are used to 
find diagnostic patterns to characterise protein families; to detect or 
demonstrate homology between new sequences and existing families of 
sequences; to help predict the secondary and tertiary structures of new 
sequences; to suggest oligonucleotide primers for PCR; as an essential prelude 
to molecular evolutionary analysis.   The rate of appearance of new sequence 
data is steadily increasing and the development of efficient and accurate 
automatic methods for multiple alignment is, therefore, of major 
importance.   The majority of automatic multiple alignments are now carried 
out using the "progressive" approach of Feng and Doolittle (1).   In this paper, 
we describe a number of improvements to the progressive multiple 
alignment method which greatly improve the sensitivity without sacrificing 
any of the speed and efficiency which makes this approach so practical.  The 
new methods are made available in a program called CLUSTAL W which is 
freely available and portable to a wide variety of computers and operating 
systems.

In order to align just two sequences, it is standard practice to use dynamic 
programming (2).  This guarantees a mathematically optimal alignment, 
given a table of scores for matches and mismatches between all amino acids 
or nucleotides (e.g. the PAM250 matrix (3) or BLOSUM62 matrix (4)) and 
penalties for insertions or deletions of different lengths.   Attempts at 
generalising dynamic programming to multiple alignments are limited to 
small numbers of short sequences (5).  For much more than eight or so 
proteins of average length, the problem is uncomputable given current 
computer power.  Therefore, all of the methods capable of handling larger 
problems in practical timescales, make use of heuristics.    Currently, the most 
widely used approach is to exploit the fact that homologous sequences are 
evolutionarily related.  One can build up a multiple alignment progressively 
by a series of pairwise alignments, following the branching order in a 
phylogenetic tree (1).  One first aligns the most closely related sequences, 
gradually adding in the more distant ones.   This approach is sufficiently fast 
to allow alignments of virtually any size.   Further, in simple cases, the 
quality of the alignments is excellent, as judged by the ability to correctly align 
corresponding domains from sequences of known secondary or tertiary 
structure (6).  In more difficult cases, the alignments give good starting points 
for further automatic or manual refinement.

This approach works well when the data set consists of sequences of different 
degrees of divergence.   Pairwise alignment of very closely related sequences 
can be carried out very accurately.   The correct answer may often be obtained 
using a wide range of parameter values (gap penalties and weight matrix).  By 
the time the most distantly related sequences are aligned, one already has a 
sample of aligned sequences which gives important information about the 
variability at each position.   The positions of the gaps that were introduced 
during the early alignments of the closely related sequences are not changed 
as new sequences are added.   This is justified because the placement of gaps 
in alignments between closely related sequences is much more accurate than 
between distantly related ones.   When all of the sequences are highly 
divergent (e.g. less than approximately 25-30% identity between any pair of 
sequences), this progressive approach becomes much less reliable.

There are two major problems with the progressive approach:  the local 
minimum problem and the choice of alignment parameters.   The local 
minimum problem stems from the "greedy" nature of the alignment strategy.  
The algorithm greedily adds sequences together, following the initial tree.  
There is no guarantee that the global optimal solution, as defined by some 
overall measure of multiple alignment quality (7,8), or anything close to it, 
will be found.   More specifically, any mistakes (misaligned regions) made 
early in the alignment process cannot be corrected later as new information 
from other sequences is added.   This problem is frequently thought of as 
mainly resulting from an incorrect branching order in the initial tree.  The 
initial trees are derived from a matrix of distances between separately aligned 
pairs of sequences and are much less reliable than trees from complete 
multiple alignments.   In our experience, however, the real problem is caused 
simply by errors in the initial alignments.  Even if the topology of the guide 
tree is correct, each alignment step in the multiple alignment process may 
have some percentage of the residues misaligned.   This percentage will be 
very low on average for very closely related sequences but will increase as 
sequences diverge.   It is these misalignments which carry through from the 
early alignment steps that cause the local minimum problem.   The only way 
to correct this is to use an iterative or stochastic sampling procedure (e.g. 
7,9,10).   We do not directly address this problem in this paper.

The alignment parameter choice problem is, in our view, at least as serious as 
the local minimum problem.   Stochastic or iterative algorithms will be just 
as badly affected as progressive ones if the parameters are inappropriate: they 
will arrive at a false global minimum.  Traditionally, one chooses one weight 
matrix and two gap penalties (one for opening a new gap and one for 
extending an existing gap) and hope that these will work well over all parts of 
all the sequences in the data set.   When the sequences are all closely related, 
this works.  The first reason is that virtually all residue weight matrices give 
most weight to identities.   When identities dominate an alignment, almost 
any weight matrix will find approximately the correct solution.   With very 
divergent sequences, however, the scores given to non-identical residues will 
become critically important; there will be more mismatches than identities.   
Different weight matrices will be optimal at different evolutionary distances 
or for different classes of proteins.  

The second reason is that the range of gap penalty values that will find the 
correct or best possible solution can be very broad for highly similar sequences 
(11).   As more and more divergent sequences are used, however, the exact 
values of the gap penalties become important for success.   In each case, there 
may be a very narrow range of values which will deliver the best alignment.  
Further, in protein alignments, gaps do not occur randomly (i.e. with equal 
probability at all positions).  They occur far more often between the major 
secondary structural elements of alpha helices and beta strands than within 
(12).

The major improvements described in this paper attempt to address the 
alignment parameter choice problem.   We dynamically vary the gap 
penalties in a position and residue specific manner. The observed relative 
frequencies of gaps adjacent to each of the 20 amino acids (12) are used to 
locally adjust the gap opening penalty after each residue.   Short stretches of 
hydrophilic residues (e.g. 5 or more) usually indicate loop or random coil 
regions and the gap opening penalties are locally reduced in these stretches.   
In addition, the locations of the gaps found in the early alignments are also 
given reduced gap opening penalties.  It has been observed in alignments 
between sequences of known structure that gaps tend not to be closer than 
roughly eight residues on average (12).   We increase the gap opening penalty 
within eight residues of exising gaps.   The two main series of amino acid 
weight matrices that are used today are the PAM series (3) and the BLOSUM 
series (4).   In each case, there is a range of matrices to choose from.  Some 
matrices are appropriate for aligning very closely related sequences where 
most weight by far is given to identities, with only the most frequent 
conservative substitutions receiving high scores.  Other matrices work better 
at greater evolutionary distances where less importance is attached to 
identities (13).  We choose different weight matrices, as the alignment 
proceeds, depending on the estimated divergence of the sequences to be 
aligned at each stage.  

Sequences are weighted to correct for unequal sampling across all 
evolutionary distances in the data set (14).   This downweights sequences that 
are very similar to other sequences in the data set and upweights the most 
divergent ones.  The weights are calculated directly from the branch lengths 
in the initial guide tree (15).   Sequence weighting has already been shown to 
be effective in improving the sensitivity of profile searches (15,16).  In the 
original CLUSTAL programs (17-19), the initial guide trees, used to guide the 
multiple alignment, were calculated using the UPGMA method (20).  We 
now use the Neighbour-Joining method (21) which is more robust against the 
effects of unequal evolutionary rates in different lineages and which gives 
better estimates of individual branch lengths.  This is useful because it is these 
branch lengths which are used to derive the sequence weights.  We also allow 
users to choose between fast approximate alignments (22) or full dynamic 
programming for the distance calculations used to make the guide tree. 

The new improvements dramatically improve the sensitivity of the 
progressive alignment method for difficult alignments involving highly 
diverged sequences.  We show one very demanding test case of over 60 SH3 
domains (23) which includes sequence pairs with as little as 12% identity and 
where there is only one exactly conserved residue across all of the sequences.   
Using default parameters, we can achieve an alignment that is almost exactly 
correct, according to available structural information (24).   Using the program 
in a wide variety of situations, we find that it will normally find the correct 
alignment, in all but the most difficult and pathological of cases.  


MATERIAL AND METHODS


The basic alignment method

The basic multiple alignment algorithm consists of three main stages: 1) all 
pairs of sequences are aligned separately in order to calculate a distance matrix 
giving the divergence of each pair of sequences; 2) a guide tree is calculated 
from the distance matrix; 3) the sequences are progressively aligned according 
to the branching order in the guide tree.   An example using 7 globin 
sequences of known tertiary structure (25) is given in figure 1.


1) The distance matrix/pairwise alignments

In the original CLUSTAL programs, the pairwise distances were calculated 
using a fast approximate method (22).   This allows very large numbers of 
sequences to be aligned, even on a microcomputer.   The scores are calculated 
as the number of k-tuple matches (runs of identical residues, typically 1 or 2 
long for proteins or 2 to 4 long for nucleotide sequences) in the best alignment 
between two sequences minus a fixed penalty for every gap.   We now offer a 
choice between this method and the slower but more accurate scores from full 
dynamic programming alignments using two gap penalties (for opening or 
extending gaps) and a full amino acid weight matrix.   These scores are 
calculated as the number of identities in the best alignment divided by the 
number of residues compared (gap positions are excluded).   Both of these 
scores are initially calculated as percent identity scores and are converted to 
distances by dividing by 100 and subtracting from 1.0 to give number of 
differences per site.   We do not correct for multiple substitutions in these 
initial distances.   In figure 1 we give the 7x7 distance matrix between the 7 
globin sequences calculated using the full dynamic programming method.


2) The guide tree

The trees used to guide the final multiple alignment process are calculated 
from the distance matrix of step 1 using the Neighbour-Joining method (21).   
This produces unrooted trees with branch lengths proportional to estimated 
divergence along each branch.   The root is placed by a "mid-point" method 
(15) at a position where the means of the branch lengths on either side of the 
root are equal.   These trees are also used to derive a weight for each sequence 
(15).   The weights are dependent upon the distance from the root of the tree 
but sequences which have a common branch with other sequences share the 
weight derived from the shared branch.   In the example in figure 1, the 
leghaemoglobin (Lgb2_Luplu) gets a weight of 0.442 which is equal to the 
length of the branch from the root to it.  The Human beta globin 
(Hbb_Human) gets a weight consisting of the length of the branch leading to 
it that is not shared with any other sequences (0.081) plus half the length of 
the branch shared with the horse beta globin (0.226/2) plus one quarter the 
length of the branch shared by all four haemoglobins (0.061/4) plus one fifth 
the branch shared between the haemoglobins and the myoglobin (0.015/5) 
plus one sixth the branch leading to all the vertebrate globins (0.062).  This 
sums to a total of 0.221.  By contrast, in the normal progressive alignment 
algorithm, all sequences would be equally weighted.  The rooted tree with 
branch lengths and sequence weights for the 7 globins is given in figure 1.  


3) Progressive alignment

The basic procedure at this stage is to use a series of pairwise alignments to 
align larger and larger groups of sequences, following the branching order in 
the guide tree.   You proceed from the tips of the rooted tree towards the root.   
In the globin example in figure 1 you align the sequences in the following 
order: human vs. horse beta globin; human vs. horse alpha globin; the 2 
alpha globins vs. the 2 beta globins; the myoglobin vs. the haemoglobins; the 
cyanohaemoglobin vs the haemoglobins plus myoglobin; the leghaemoglobin 
vs. all the rest.  At each stage a full dynamic programming (26,27) algorithm is 
used with a residue weight matrix and penalties for opening and extending 
gaps.   Each step consists of aligning two existing alignments or sequences.  
Gaps that are present in older alignments remain fixed.  In the basic 
algorithm, new gaps that are introduced at each stage get full gap opening and 
extension penalties, even if they are introduced inside old gap positions (see 
the section on gap penalties below for modifications to this rule).  In order to 
calculate the score between a position from one sequence or alignment and 
one from another, the average of all the pairwise weight matrix scores from 
the amino acids in the two sets of sequences is used i.e. if you align 2 
alignments with 2 and 4 sequences respectively, the score at each position is 
the average of 8 (2x4) comparisons.   This is illustrated in figure 2.  If either set 
of sequences contains one or more gaps in one of the positions being 
considered, each gap versus a residue is scored as zero.   The default amino 
acid weight matrices we use are rescored to have only positive values. 
Therefore, this treatment of gaps treats the score of a residue versus a gap as 
having the worst possible score.  When sequences are weighted (see 
improvements to progressive alignment, below), each weight matrix value is 
multiplied by the weights from the 2 sequences, as illustrated in figure 2.


Improvements to progressive alignment

All of the remaining modifications apply only to the final progressive 
alignment stage.   Sequence weighting is relatively straightforward and is 
already widely used in profile searches (15,16).   The treatment of gap penalties 
is more complicated.   Initial gap penalties are calculated depending on the 
weight matrix, the similarity of the sequences, and the length of the 
sequences. Then, an attempt is made to derive sensible local gap opening 
penalties at every position in each pre-aligned group of sequences that will 
vary as new sequences are added.   The use of different weight matrices as the 
alignment progresses is novel and largely by-passes the problem of initial 
choice of weight matrix.   The final modification allows us to delay the 
addition of very divergent sequences until the end of the alignment process 
when all of the more closely related sequences have already been aligned.


Sequence weighting

Sequence weights are calculated directly from the guide tree.    The weights 
are normalised such that the biggest one is set to 1.0 and the rest are all less 
than one.  Groups of closely related sequences receive lowered weights 
because they contain much duplicated information.  Highly divergent 
sequences without any close relatives receive high weights.  These weights 
are used as simple multiplication factors for scoring positions from different 
sequences or prealigned groups of sequences.  The method is illustrated in 
figure 2.  In the globin example in figure 1, the two alpha globins get 
downweighted because they are almost duplicate sequences (as do the two 
beta globins); they receive a combined weight of only slightly more than if a 
single alpha globin was used.   


Initial gap penalties

Initially, two gap penalties are used: a gap opening penalty (GOP) which gives 
the cost of opening a new gap of any length and a gap extension penalty (GEP) 
which gives the cost of every item in a gap.  Initial values can be set by the 
user from a menu.   The software then automatically attempts to choose 
appropriate gap penalties for each sequence alignment, depending on the 
following factors.

1) Dependence on the weight matrix

It has been shown (16,28) that varying the gap penalties used with different 
weight matrices can improve the accuracy of sequence alignments. Here, we 
use the average score for two mismatched residues (ie. off-diagonal values in 
the matrix) as a scaling factor for the GOP.

2) Dependence on the similarity of the sequences

The percent identity of the two (groups of) sequences to be aligned is used to 
increase the GOP for closely related sequences and decrease it for more 
divergent sequences on a linear scale.

3) Dependence on the lengths of the sequences   

The scores for both true and false sequence alignments grow with the length 
of the sequences. We use the logarithm of the length of the shorter sequence 
to increase the GOP with sequence length.

Using these three modifications, the initial GOP calculated by the program is:

GOP->(GOP+log(MIN(N,M))) * (average residue mismatch score) *
                                                               (percent identity scaling factor)
where N, M are the lengths of the two sequences.

4) Dependence on the difference in the lengths of the sequences

The GEP is modified depending on the difference between the lengths of the 
two sequences to be aligned. If one sequence is much shorter than the other, 
the GEP is increased to inhibit too many long gaps in the shorter sequence.
The initial GEP calculated by the program is:

GEP ->  GEP*(1.0+|log(N/M)|) 
where N, M are the lengths of the two sequences.


Position-specific gap penalties

 In most dynamic programming applications, the initial gap opening and 
extension penalties are applied equally at every position in the sequence, 
regardless of the location of a gap, except for terminal gaps which are usually 
allowed at no cost.   In CLUSTAL W, before any pair of sequences or 
prealigned groups of sequences are aligned, we generate a table of gap opening 
penalties for every position in the two (sets of) sequences.  An example is 
shown in figure 3.  We manipulate the initial gap opening penalty in a 
position specific manner, in order to make gaps more or less likely at different 
positions.   

The local gap penalty modification rules are applied in a hierarchical manner.   
The exact details of each rule are given below.  Firstly, if there is a gap at a 
position, the gap opening and gap extension penalties are lowered; the other 
rules do not apply.   This makes gaps more likely at positions where there are 
already gaps.  If there is no gap at a position, then the gap opening penalty is 
increased if the position is within 8 residues of an existing gap.   This 
discourages gaps that are too close together.  Finally, at any position within a 
run of hydrophilic residues, the penalty is decreased.  These runs usually 
indicate loop regions in protein structures.  If there is no run of hydrophilic 
residues, the penalty is modified using a table of residue specific gap 
propensities (12).   These propensities were derived by counting the frequency 
of each residue at either end of gaps in alignments of proteins of known 
structure.  An illustration of the application of these rules from one part of 
the globin example, in figure 1, is given in figure 3.  

1) Lowered gap penalties at existing gaps

If there are already gaps at a position, then the GOP is reduced in proportion 
to the number of sequences with a gap at this position and the GEP is lowered 
by a half.  The new gap opening penalty is calculated as:

GOP ->  GOP*0.3*(no. of sequences without a gap/no. of sequences).

2) Increased gap penalties near existing gaps

If a position does not have any gaps but is within 8 residues of an existing gap, 
the GOP is increased by:

GOP ->  GOP*(2+((8-distance from gap)*2)/8)

3) Reduced gap penalties in hydrophilic stretches

Any run of 5 hydrophilic residues is considered to be a hydrophilic stretch.  
The residues that are to be considered hydrophilic may be set by the user but 
are conservatively set to D, E, G, K, N, Q, P, R or S by default.   If, at any 
position, there are no gaps and any of the sequences has such a stretch, the 
GOP is reduced by one third.


4) Residue specific penalties

If there is no hydrophilic stretch and the position does not contain any gaps, 
then the GOP is multiplied by one of the 20 numbers in table 1, depending on 
the residue.  If there is a mixture of residues at a position, the multiplication 
factor is the average of all the contributions from each sequence.  


Weight matrices

Two main series of weight matrices are offered to the user: the Dayhoff PAM 
series (3) and the BLOSUM series (4).   The default is the BLOSUM series.  In 
each case, there is a choice of matrix ranging from strict ones, useful for 
comparing very closely related sequences to very "soft" ones that are useful 
for comparing very distantly related sequences.   Depending on the distance 
between the two sequences or groups of sequences to be compared, we switch 
between 4 different matrices.  The distances are measured directly from the 
guide tree.  The ranges of distances and tables used with the PAM series of 
matrices is: 80-100%:PAM20, 60-80%:PAM60, 40-60%:PAM120, 0-40%:PAM350. 
The range used with the BLOSUM series is:80-100%:BLOSUM80,
60-80%:BLOSUM62, 30-60%:BLOSUM45, 0-30%:BLOSUM30.


Divergent sequences

The most divergent sequences (most different, on average from all of the 
other sequences) are usually the most difficult to align correctly.  It is 
sometimes better to delay the incorporation of these sequences until all of the 
more easily aligned sequences are merged first.  This may give a better chance 
of correctly placing the gaps and matching weakly conserved positions against 
the rest of the sequences.   A choice is offered to set a cut off (default is 40% 
identity or less with any other sequence) that will delay the alignment of the 
divergent sequences until all of the rest have been aligned.  


Software and Algorithms


Dynamic Programming

The most demanding part of the multiple alignment strategy, in terms of 
computer processing and memory usage, is the alignment of two (groups of) 
sequences at each step in the final progressive alignment.   To make it 
possible to align very long sequences (e.g. dynein heavy chains at ~ 5,000 
residues) in a reasonable amount of memory, we use the memory efficient 
dynamic programming algorithm of Myers and Miller (26).   This sacrifices 
some processing time but makes very large alignments practical in very little 
memory.   One disadvantage of this algorithm is that it does not allow 
different gap opening and extension penalties at each position.  We have 
modified the algorithm so as to allow this and the details are described in a 
separate paper (27).   



Menus/file formats

Six different sequence input formats are detected automatically and read by 
the program:  EMBL/Swiss Prot, NBRF/PIR, Pearson/FASTA (29), GCG/MSF 
(30), GDE (Steven Smith, Harvard University Genome Center) and CLUSTAL 
format alignments.   The last three formats allow users to read in complete 
alignments (e.g. for calculating phylogenetic trees or for addition of new 
sequences to an existing alignment).   Alignment output may be requested in 
standard CLUSTAL format (self-explanatory blocked alignments) or in 
formats compatible with the GDE, PHYLIP (31) or GCG (30) packages.   The 
program offers the user the ability to calculate Neighbour-Joining 
phylogenetic trees from existing alignments with options to correct for 
multiple hits (32,33) and to estimate confidence levels using a bootstrap 
resampling procedure (34).   The trees may be output in the "New 
Hampshire" format that is compatible with the PHYLIP package (31).

Alignment to an alignment

Profile alignment is used to align two existing alignments (either of which 
may consist of just one sequence) or to add a series of new sequences to an 
existing alignment.   This is useful because one may wish to build up a 
multiple alignment gradually, choosing different parameters manually, or 
correcting intermediate errors as the alignment proceeds.   Often, just a few 
sequences cause misalignments in the progressive algorithm and these can be 
removed from the process and then added at the end by profile alignment.  A 
second use is where one has a high quality reference alignment and wishes to 
keep it fixed while adding new sequences automatically.  


Portability/Availability

The full source code of the package is provided free to academic users.   The 
program will run on any machine with a full ANSI conforming C compiler.  
It has been tested on the following hardware/software combinations:  
Decstation/Ultrix, Vax or ALPHA/VMS, Silicon Graphics/IRIX.   The source 
code and documentation are available by E-mail from the EMBL file server 
(send the words HELP and HELP SOFTWARE on two lines to the internet 
address: 
Netserv@EMBL-Heidelberg.DE) or by anonymous FTP from 
FTP.EMBL-Heidelberg.DE.  Queries may be addressed by E-mail to 
Des.Higgins@EBI.AC.UK or Gibson@EMBL-Heidelberg.DE.


RESULTS AND DISCUSSION


Alignment of SH3 Domains

The ~60 residue SH3 domain was chosen to illustrate the performance of 
CLUSTAL W, as there is a reference manual alignment (23) and the fold is 
known (24).  SH3 domains, with a minimum similarity below 12% identity, 
are poorly aligned by progressive alignment programs such as CLUSTAL V 
and PILEUP: neither program can generate the correct blocks corresponding to 
the secondary structure elements. 

Figure 4 shows an alignment generated by CLUSTAL W of the example set of 
SH3 domains. The alignment was generated in two steps. After progressive 
alignment, five blocks were produced, corresponding to structural elements, 
with gaps inserted exclusively in the known loop regions. The beta strands in 
blocks 1, 4 and 5 were all correctly superposed. However, four sequences in 
block 2 and one sequence in block 3 were misaligned by 1-2 residues 
(underlined in figure 4). A second progressive alignment of the aligned 
sequences, including the gaps, improved this alignment: A single misaligned 
sequence, H_P55, remains in block 2 (boxed in figure 4), while block 3 is now 
completely aligned.  This alignment corrects several errors (eg. P85A, P85B 
and FUS1) in the manual alignment (23).

The SH3 alignment illustrates several features of CLUSTAL W usage. Firstly, 
in a practical application involving divergent sequences, the initial 
progressive alignment is likely to be a good but not perfect approximation to 
the correct alignment. The alignment quality can be improved in a number of 
ways. If the block structure of the alignment appears to be correct, realignment 
of the alignment will usually improve most of the misaligned blocks: the 
existing gaps allow the blocks to "float" cheaply to a locally optimal position 
without disturbing the rest of the alignment. Remaining sequences which are 
doubtfully aligned can then be individually tested by profile alignment to the 
remainder: the misaligned H_P55 SH3 domain can be correctly aligned by 
profile (with GOP <= 8). The indel regions in the final alignment can then be 
manually cleaned up: Usually the exact alignment in the loop regions is not 
determinable, and may have no meaning in structural terms. It is then 
desirable to have a single gap per structural loop. CLUSTAL W achieved this 
for two of the four SH3 loop regions (figure 4).

If the block structure of the alignment appears suspect, greater intervention by 
the user may be required. The most divergent sequences, especially if they 
have large insertions (which can be discerned with the aid of dot matrix 
plots), should be left out of the progressive alignment. If there are sets of 
closely related sequences that are deeply diverged from other sets, these can be 
separately aligned and then merged by profile alignment. Incorrectly 
determined sequences, containing frameshifts, can also confound regions of 
an alignment: these can be hard to detect but sometimes they have been 
grouped within the excluded divergent sequences: then they may be revealed 
when they are individually compared to the alignment as having apparently 
nonsense segments with respect to the other sequences. 



Finding the best alignment

In cases where all of the sequences in a data set are very similar (e.g. no pair 
less than 35% identical), CLUSTAL W will find an alignment which is 
difficult to improve by eye.  In this sense, the alignment is optimal with 
regard to the alternative of manual alignment.  Mathematically, this is vague 
and can only be put on a more systematic footing by finding an objective 
function (a measure of multiple alignment quality) that exactly mirrors the 
information used by an "expert" to evaluate an alignment.  Nonetheless, if an 
alignment is impossible to improve by eye, then the program has achieved a 
very useful result.   

In more difficult cases, as more divergent sequences are included, it becomes 
increasingly difficult to find good alignments and to evaluate them.    What 
we find with CLUSTAL W is that the basic block-like structure of the 
alignment (corresponding to the major secondary structure elements) is 
usually recovered, with some of the most divergent sequences misaligned in 
small regions.  This is a very useful starting point for manual refinement as it 
helps define the major blocks of similarity.   The problem sequences can be 
removed from the analysis and realigned to the rest of the sequences 
automatically or with different parameter settings.   An examination of the 
tree used to guide the alignment will usually show which sequences will be 
most unreliably placed (those that branch off closest to the root and/or those 
that align to other single sequences at a very low level of sequence identity 
rather than align to a group of pre-aligned sequences).  Finally, one can 
simply iterate the multiple alignment process by feeding an output alignment 
back into CLUSTAL W and repeating the multiple alignment process (using 
the same or different parameters).   The SH3 domain alignment in figure 4 
was derived in this way by 2 passes using default parameters.  In the second 
pass, the local gap penalties are dominated by the placement of the initial 
major gap positions.  The alignment will either remain unchanged or will 
converge rapidly (after 1 or 2 extra passes) on a better solution.  If the 
placement of the initial gaps is approximately correct but some of the 
sequences are locally misaligned, this works well.  


Comparison with other methods

Recently, several papers have addressed the problem of position specific 
parameters for multiple alignment.  In one case (35), local gap penalties are 
increased in alpha helical and beta strand regions, when the 3-D structures of 
one or more of the sequences are known.  In a second case (36), a hidden 
Markov model was used to estimate position specific gap penalties and 
residue substitution weight matrices when large numbers of examples of a 
protein domain were known.  With CLUSTAL W, we attempt to derive the 
same information purely from the set of sequences to be aligned.  Therefore, 
we can apply the method to any set of sequences.  The success of this approach 
will depend on the number of available sequences and their evolutionary 
relationships.  It will also depend on the decision making process during 
multiple alignment (e.g. when to change weight matrix) and the accuracy and 
appropriateness of our parameterisation.  In the long term, this can only be 
evaluated by exhaustive testing of sets of sequences where the correct 
alignment (or parts of it) are known from structural information.   What is 
clear, however, is that the modifications described here significantly improve 
the sensitivity of the progressive multiple alignment approach.  This is 
achieved with almost no sacrifice in speed and efficiency.  

There are several areas where further improvements in sensitivity and 
accuracy can be made.  Firstly, the residue weight matrices and gap settings 
can be made more accurate as more and more data accumulate, while 
matrices for specific sequence types can be derived (e.g. for transmembrane 
regions (37)).  Secondly, stochastic or iterative optimisation methods can be 
used to refine initial alignments (7,9,10).   CLUSTAL W could be run with 
several sets of starting parameters and in each case, the alignments refined 
according to an objective function.   The search for a good objective function, 
that takes into account the sequence and position specific information used in 
CLUSTAL W is a key area of research.   Finally, the average number of 
examples of each protein domain or family is growing steadily.  It is not only 
important that programs can cope with the large volumes of data that are 
being generated, they should be able to exploit the new information to make 
the alignments more and more accurate.   Globally optimal alignments 
(according to an objective function) may not always be possible but the 
problem may be avoided if sufficiently large volumes of data become 
available.  CLUSTAL W is a step in this direction.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Numerous people have offered advice and suggestions for improvements to 
earlier versions of the CLUSTAL programs.  D.H. wishes to apologise to all of 
the irate CLUSTAL V users who had to live with the bugs and lack of facilities 
for getting trees in the New Hampshire format.  We wish to specifically thank 
Jeroen Coppieters who suggested using a series of weight matrices and Steven 
Henikoff for advice on using the BLOSUM matrices.  We are grateful to Rein 
Aasland, Peer Bork, Ariel Blocker and BŽrtrand Seraphin for providing 
challenging alignment problems.   T.G. and J.T. thank Kevin Leonard for 
support and encouragement.  Finally, we thank all of the people who were 
involved with various CLUSTAL programs over the years, namely: Paul 
Sharp, Rainer Fuchs and Alan Bleasby.


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FIGURE LEGENDS

Figure 1.  The basic progressive alignment procedure, illustrated using a set of 
7 globins of known tertiary structure.  The sequence names are from Swiss 
Prot (38):  Hba_Horse: horse alpha globin; Hba_Human: human alpha globin; 
Hbb_Horse: horse beta globin; Hbb_Human: human beta globin; Myg_Phyca: 
sperm whale myoglobin; Glb5_Petma: lamprey cyanohaemoglobin; 
Lgb2_Luplu: lupin leghaemoglobin.   In the distance matrix, the mean 
number of differences per residue is given.  The unrooted tree shows all 
branch lengths drawn to scale.  In the rooted tree, all branch lengths (mean 
number of differences per residue along each branch) are given as well as 
weights for each sequence.  In the multiple alignment, the approximate 
positions of the 7 alpha helices, common to all 7 proteins are shown.  This 
alignment was derived using CLUSTAL W with default parameters and the 
PAM (3) series of weight matrices.  

Figure 2.  The scoring scheme for comparing two positions from two 
alignments.   Two sections of alignment with 4 and 2 sequences respectively 
are shown.   The score of the position with amino acids T,L,K,K versus the 
position with amino acids V and I is given with and without sequence 
weights.  M(X,Y) is the weight matrix entry for amino acid X versus amino 
acid Y.  Wn is the weight for sequence n.

Figure 3.  The variation in local gap opening penalty is plotted for a section of 
alignment.  The inital gap opening penalty is indicated by a dotted line. Two 
hydrophilic stretches are underlined.  The lowest penalties correspond to the 
ends of the alignment, the hydrophilic stretches and the two positions with 
gaps.   The highest values are within 8 residues of the two gap positions.  The 
rest of the variation is caused by the residue specific gap penalties (12).

Figure 4.  CLUSTAL W Alignment of a set of SH3 domains taken from (23). 
Secondary structure assignments for the solved Spectrin (24) and Fyn (39) 
domains are according to DSSP (40). The alignment was generated in two 
steps using default parameters. After full multiple alignment, the aligned 
sequences were realigned. Segments which were correctly aligned in the 
second pass are underlined. The single misaligned segment in H_P55 and the 
misaligned residue in H_NCK/2 are boxed.

The sequences are coloured to illustrate significant features. All G (orange) 
and P (yellow) are coloured. Other residues matching a frequent occurrence of 
a property in a column are coloured: hydrophobic = blue; hydrophobic 
tendency = light blue; basic = red; acidic = purple; hydrophilic = green; White 
= unconserved. The alignment figure was prepared with the GDE sequence 
editor (S. Smith, Harvard University) and COLORMASK (J. Thompson, 
EMBL).




Table 1.  Pascarella and Argos residue specific gap modification factors.   
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
A       1.13            M       1.29
C       1.13            N       0.63
D       0.96            P       0.74
E       1.31            Q       1.07
F       1.20            R       0.72
G       0.61            S       0.76
H       1.00            T       0.89
I       1.32            V       1.25
K       0.96            Y       1.00
L       1.21            W       1.23
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The values are normalised around a mean value of 1.0 for H.  The lower the 
value, the greater the chance of having an adjacent gap.  These are derived 
from the original table of relative frequencies of gaps adjacent to each residue 
(12) by subtraction from 2.0.