Chimeric Alignment By Dynamic Programming: Algorithm and biological uses

A new nearest-neighbor method for detecting chimeric 16S rRNA artifacts generated during PCR amplification from mixed populations has been developed. The method uses dynamic programming to generate an optimal chimeric alignment, defined as the highest scoring alignment between a query and a concatenation of a 5 0 and a 3 0 segment from two separate entries from a database of related sequences. Chimeras are detected by studying the scores and form of the chimeric and global sequence alignments. The chimeric alignment method was found to be marginally more effective than k-tuple based nearest-neighbor methods in simulation studies, but its most effective use is in concert with k-tuple methods