MT-ClustalW: multithreading multiple sequence alignment

ClustalW is the most widely used tool for aligning multiple protein or nucleotide sequences. The alignment is achieved via three stages: pairwise alignment, guide tree generation and progressive alignment. This paper analyzes and enhances a multithreaded implementation of ClustalW called ClustalW-SMP for higher throughput. Our goal is to maximize the degree of parallelism on multithreading ClustalW called MultiThreading-ClustalW (MT-ClustalW). As a result, bioinformatics laboratories are able to use this MT-ClustalW with much less energy consumption on multicore and SMP (symmetric multiprocessor) machines than that of PC clusters. The experiment results show that the MT-ClustalW framework can achieve a considerable speedup over the sequential ClustalW and original multithreaded ClustalW-SMP implementations