Optimization of Substitution Matrix for Sequence Alignment of Major Capsid Proteins of Human Herpes Simplex Virus

Protein sequence alignment has become an informative tool in modern molecular biology research. A number of substitution matrices have been readily available for sequence alignments, but it is challenging task to compute optimal matrices for alignment accuracy. Here, we used the parameter optimization procedure to select the optimal Q of substitution matrices for major viral capsid protein of human herpes simplex virus. Results predict that Blosum matrix is most accurate on alignment benchmarks, and Blosum 60 provides the optimal Q in all substitution matrices. PAM 200 matrices results slightly below than Blosum 60, while VTML matrices are intermediate of PAM and VT matrices under dynamic programming.