In
bioinformatics, a
sequence alignment is a way of arranging the sequences of
DNA,
RNA, or
protein to identify regions of similarity that may be a consequence of functional,
structural, or
evolutionary relationships between the sequences. Aligned sequences of
nucleotide or
amino acid residues are typically represented as rows within a
matrix. Gaps are inserted between the
residues so that identical or similar characters are aligned in successive columns. Sequence alignments are also used for non-biological sequences, such as calculating the
edit distance cost between strings in a
natural language or in financial data.