Posts

Showing posts from February, 2021

Best Fonts to Display Biological Sequence and Alignment

Image
Biological sequence alignment is a method to find similarities between two sequences. The characters (letters or biological sequence alphabets) are arranged row-wise and column-wise according to match/identity and mismatch of characters through symbol representation. In row-wise, a gap character (hyphen symbol ‘-’) is used to align/adjust the sequence characters for matching without changing the order. Correspondingly, the column-wise characters such as match (same character, pipe symbol ‘|’, colon symbol ‘:’, asterisk symbol ‘*’, or dot symbol ‘.’), mismatch (anyone of the sequence character, or blank space ‘ ’), positive (positive symbol ‘+’), and gap/indel (blank space ‘ ’) are used to represent sequence alignment. A sequence or sequence alignment must be properly formatted in a text editor/word processor using fixed-width fonts to find the differences of characters in the sequence and control word wrapping. Formatting sequence helps to find the sequence length and formatting s