Aligning Two Genomic Sequences That Contain Duplications

It is difficult to properly align genomic sequences that contain intra-species duplications. With this goal in mind, we have developed a tool, called TOAST (two-way orthologous alignment selection tool), for predicting whether two aligned regions from different species are orthologous, i.e., separated by a speciation event, as opposed to a duplication event. The advantage of restricting alignment to orthologous pairs is that they constitute the aligning regions that are most likely to share the same biological function, and most easily analyzed for evidence of selection. We evaluate TOAST on 12 human/mouse gene clusters.