D.G. Higgins, A.J. Bleasby, R. Fuchs, "CLUSTAL V: improved software for multiple sequence alignment," Computer Applications in the Biosciences, 8:189-191, 1992.
Des Higgins (European Molecular Biology Laboratory, Heidelberg, Germany): "CLUSTAL V is derived from an earlier set of programs (Clustal 1,2,3, and 4) that I wrote in Paul Sharp's laboratory in Dublin. This package was designed to allow molecular biologists to take a set of unaligned, homologous nucleotide or protein sequences and produce an accurate multiple alignment, automatically and quickly. When one considers that this is such a common, time-consuming task, there were surprisingly few practical methods for doing this until the late 1980s. A simple extension of the usual `dynamic programming' methods, widely used for two-sequence alignment, quickly becomes uncomputable for even a small number of sequences.
"The breakthrough came from using the fact that homologous sequences are related to each other phylogenetically; one can use the underlying treelike ...
