Sequence Alignment

Sequence alignment, the process of comparing and matching sequences (e.g., DNA, RNA, protein, or even text), aims to identify similarities and differences, revealing evolutionary relationships or functional insights. Current research emphasizes developing sophisticated alignment methods using transformer-based architectures and implicit neural representations, often incorporating self-supervised learning and contrastive loss functions to improve accuracy and efficiency. These advancements are impacting diverse fields, from genomics and proteomics (improving DNA/RNA alignment and protein structure prediction) to speech synthesis and drug discovery (enhancing text-to-speech systems and ligand-receptor interaction modeling). The resulting improvements in alignment accuracy and speed are crucial for accelerating scientific discovery and technological innovation.