Constructing Entropy Plot from Multiple Sequence Alignment

The entropy in sequence analysis refers to the measure of the variation of characters (column) in multiple sequences. Entropy plot through multiple sequence alignment can be predicted using different types of entropy formulas, namely Shannon's Entropy, Schneider's Entropy, Shenkin's Entropy, Gerstein's Entropy, and Gap normalized Entropy.

Prediction of entropy plot consists of two phases: (i) performing multiple sequence alignment and consensus, and (ii) calculation of entropy number for each column through consensus of multiple sequence alignment. The entropy plot is generated by plotting vertical lines in the order of the consensus sequence on the x-axis, and the entropy number on the y-axis. This simple video tutorial demonstrates how to predict entropy plot through multiple sequence alignment. The tools used in this tutorial are ClustalW, and Entropy Plotter.

Note: We can choose any multiple sequence alignment tool, but the alignment output must be FASTA file format.