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. 2011 May 10;12:144. doi: 10.1186/1471-2105-12-144

Table 5.

Prune results for twelve alignment problems from the Rfam database.

Time Agree.

Pecan1 _a _a
Prune w/Pecan 60% _a _a
30% 14.6 0.651
15% 5.35 0.649
7% 2.57 0.643
FSA2 13.6 0.792
Prune w/FSA 60% 10.3 0.669
30% 4.30 0.615
15% 2.39 0.636
7% 2.17 0.636

MUSCLE3 3.67 0.709
Prune w/MUSCLE 60% 3.03 0.704
30% 1.23 0.649
15% 1.03 0.672
7% 1.42 0.659

MAFFT4 0.04 0.693

SATé5 93.9 0.753

1 Pecan was run with default parameters.

2 FSA was run with the --exonerate, --anchored, --softmasked, and --fast flags.

3 MUSCLE was run with default parameters.

4 MAFFT was run with --treein option.

5 SATé was run with the -t option but limited to two iterations. We found that more iterations did almost nothing for accuracy.

a The majority of problems were unable to be aligned due to running out of memory.

The run-time and agreement score of Prune alignments of twelve RNA alignment problems from the Rfam database. The average time and agreement over all twelve problems are shown. Pecan, FSA, and MUSCLE were used as the underlying alignment method of Prune. MAFFT and SATé were also tested to provide comparison. We were unable to apply Pecan without using Prune because of memory issues. Using Prune, we were able to use Pecan to solve these alignment problems. Prune achieved a very large speedup with little loss of accuracy. Other alignment methods achieved a large speedup but more accuracy was lost.