DNA alignment

It is a process of aligning base pairs in one sequence with those of the other sequence, often to look for similarities between the two. DNA base pair alignment is useful for determining if two DNA sequences (from the same and/or different genomes) are homologous (related by common ancestry). When used to deduce the evolutionary relationship for protein coding DNA sequences, this method is more appropriate for comparisons between closely related species because DNA is likely to mutate more quickly than amino acid residues in a protein sequence.