THE ASYMPTOTIC PLURALITY RULE FOR MOLECULAR SEQUENCES

The asymptotic plurality rule, apl, is a consensus function which maps each profile P of length n (i.e., each sequence of n bases appearing at an aligned position of n molecules) to a set apl(P) of consensus re sults (i.e., ambiguity codes) that is a descriptive summary of P. Our main result is to characterize each consensus result X = apl(P) in ter ms of the frequencies with which the bases in P occur. We then use the se characterizations to investigate features (e.g., strong consistency , length independence) of apl that researchers may find useful for the interpretation of apl's consensus results.