Finding consensus by sequence evolution: An application of Differential evolution

The paper proposes a novel idea of finding consensus of biological sequences using sequence evolution. It involves application of meta-heuristic optimization technique called Differential Evolution for the creation of a population of evolved sequences. This evolved population of sequences is used to find consensus using Position Frequency Matrix. DNA Sequences of highly risk HPV16 of Human pappilomavirus are used for the experimental purpose. A unique encoding procedure is used to encode the sequence of nucleotides to integers, making different Differential evolution operations possible. The experimental results validate the effectiveness of finding consensus from an evolved population sequences rather than finding the same from a known collection of sequences.