Institute of Bioinformatics

msa: An R Package for Multiple Sequence Alignment

The msa provides a unified R/Bioconductor interface to the multiple sequence alignment algorithms ClustalW, ClustalOmega, and MUSCLE. All three algorithms are integrated in the package, therefore, they do not depend on any external software tools and are available for all major platforms. The multiple sequence alignment algorithms are complemented by a function for pretty-printing multiple sequence alignments using the LaTeX ackage TeXshade.

Installation

The R package msa is available from Bioconductor. The first version of the package has been released as part of Bioconductor 3.1 on April 17, 2015. The current version of the package is 1.10.0 (released on October 31, 2017, as part of Bioconductor 3.6). To install msa, follow the simple standard procedure for installing Bioconductor packages i.e. enter the following into your R session:

source("http://www.bioconductor.org/biocLite.R")
biocLite("msa")

Please note that Bioconductor 3.6 requires R version 3.4.2.

The current development version of the package is 1.11.0.

Documentation

User Manual: PDF
Reference Manual: PDF

Getting started

To load the package, enter "library(msa)" in your R session.
To view the user manual, enter "vignette("msa")".
To do a first example, enter "example(msa)".

User support

If you encounter any issues or if you have any question that might be of interest also for other users, before writing a private message to the package developers/maintainers, please consider posting on Bioconductor Support or StackOverflow. For all other matters regarding the package, please contact [email protected].

Citing this package

If you use this package for research that is published later, you are kindly asked to cite it as follows:

U. Bodenhofer, E. Bonatesta, C. Horejš-Kainrath, and S. Hochreiter (2015). msa: an R package for multiple sequence alignment. Bioinformatics 31(24):3997-3999. DOI: 10.1093/bioinformatics/btv494.

R source code for example alignment presented in paper: Example.R (0.7 KB)

Moreover, we insist that, any time you use/cite the package, you also cite the original paper in which the algorithm/method/package that you have been using has been introduced:

ClustalW:: J. D. Thompson, D. G. Higgins, and T. J. Gibson (1994).CLUSTAL W: improving the sensitivity of progressive multiple sequence alignment through sequence weighting, position-specific gap penalties and weight matrix choice. Nucleic Acids Res., 22(22):4673 4680. DOI: 10.1093/nar/22.22.4673.
ClustalOmega:: F. Sievers, A. Wilm, D. Dineen, T. J. Gibson, K. Karplus, W. Li, R. Lopez, H. McWilliam, M. Remmert, J. Söding, J. D. Thompson, and D. G. Higgins (2011) Fast, scalable generation of high-quality protein multiple sequence alignments using Clustal Omega. Mol. Syst. Biol., 7:539. DOI: 10.1038/msb.2011.75.
MUSCLE:: R. C. Edgar (2004) MUSCLE: a multiple sequence alignment method with reduced time and space complexity. BMC Bioinformatics, 5(5):113. DOI: 10.1186/1471-2105-5-113.
R. C. Edgar (2004) MUSCLE: multiple sequence alignment with high accuracy and high throughput. Nucleic Acids Res., 32(5):1792 1797. DOI: 10.1093/nar/gkh340.
TeXshade:: E. Beitz (2000) TeXshade: shading and labeling of multiple sequence alignments using LaTeX2e. Bioinformatics, 16(2):135-139. DOI: 10.1093/bioinformatics/16.2.135.

Change log

Version 1.10.0:

release as part of Bioconductor 3.6

Version 1.9.0:

devel branch created from version 1.8.0

Version 1.8.0:

release as part of Bioconductor 3.5

Version 1.7.1:

additional conversions implemented for msaConvert() function
added a new method msaConsensusSequence() that extends the functionality provided by Biostring's consensusString() method
added a new method msaConservationScore()
print() method extended such that it now also allows for customization of the consensus sequence (via the new msaConsensusSequence() method)
package now depends on Biostrings version ≥ 2.40.0 in order to make sure that consensusMatrix() also works correctly for masked alignments
corresponding changes in documentation and vignette

Version 1.7.0:

new branch for Bioconductor 3.5 devel

Version 1.6.0:

release as part of Bioconductor 3.4

Version 1.5.5:

fixes in ClustalOmega source code to ensure Windows compatibility of GCC6 compatibility fix

Version 1.5.4:

bug fix in msaClustalW(): unsupported parameter 'tree' deactivated
fixes in ClustalOmega source code to ensure GCC6 compatibility
fix in msaConvert() function to improve safety of call to suggested package 'phangorn'

Version 1.5.3:

additional conversions implemented for msaConvert() function
corresponding changes in documentation

Version 1.5.1 / 1.5.2:

version number bumps for technical reasons related to Bioconductor build servers

Version 1.5.0:

new branch for Bioconductor 3.4 devel

Version 1.4.0:

release as part of Bioconductor 3.3

Version 1.3.7:

fixes in msaPrettyPrint() function

Version 1.3.6:

msaPrettyPrint() now also accepts dashes in file names
added section about pretty-printing wide alignments to package vignette

Version 1.3.5:

adaptation of displaying help text by msa() function

Version 1.3.4:

added function for checking and fixing sequence names for possibly problematic characters that could lead to LaTeX errors when using msaPrettyPrint()
corresponding changes in documentation
minor namespace fix

Version 1.3.3:

added function for converting multiple sequence alignments for use with other sequence alignment packages
corresponding changes in documentation

Version 1.3.2:

further fixes in Makefiles and Makevars files to account for changes in build system
update of citation information

Version 1.3.1:

fixes in Makefiles and Makevars files to account for changes in build system

Version 1.3.0:

new branch for Bioconductor 3.3 devel

Version 1.2.0:

release as part of Bioconductor 3.2

Version 1.1.3:

bug fix related to custom substitution matrices in the MUSCLE interface
correction and updates of documentation

Version 1.1.2:

new print() function for multiple alignments that also allows for displaying alignments in their entirety (plus additional customizations)
strongly improved handling of custom substitution matrices by msaClustalW(): now custom matrices can also be supplied for nucleotide sequences which can also be passed via the "substitutionMatrix" argument. The "dnamatrix" argument is still available for the sake of backwards compatibility.
strongly improved handling of custom substitution matrices by msaMuscle()
fix of improperly aligned sequence logos produced by msaPrettyPrint()
updated citation information

Version 1.1.1:

fix of msa() function

Version 1.1.0:

new branch for Bioconductor 3.2 devel

Version 1.0.0:

first official release as part of Bioconductor 3.1