Eulerian path methods for multiple sequence alignment

With the rapid increase in the size of genome sequence databases, the multiple sequence alignment problem is increasingly important and often requires the alignment of a large number of sequences. Beginning in 1975, many heuristic algorithms have been created to improve the speed of computation and the quality of alignment. We introduce a novel approach that is fundamentally distinct from all currently available methods. Our motivation comes from the Eulerian method for fragment assembly in DNA sequence determination, that transforms all the DNA sequencing fragments into a de Bruijn graph and then reduces sequence assembly to a Eulerian path problem.