CONSENSUS FUNCTIONS AND PATTERNS IN MOLECULAR SEQUENCES

In recent years, methods of consensus, developed for the solution of p roblems in the social sciences, have become widely used in molecular b iology. We study a method of consensus originally due to Waterman et a l. (Waterman, Galas and Arratia. 1984. Pattern recognition in several sequences: consensus and alignment. Bull. math. Biol. 46, 515-527) whi ch is used to identify patterns or features in a molecular sequence wh ere a pattern can vary in position within a given window. We show that some well-known consensus methods of the social sciences, the median and the mean, are special cases of this method for certain choices of the parameters used in it and give a precise account of the parameters for which these special cases arise. We also show that the specific p arameters used in the method of Waterman et al. make their method equi valent to the median procedure which is widely used in the social scie nces.