Parallelization of the MAFFT multiple sequence alignment program

Multiple sequence alignment (MSA) is an important step in comparative sequence analyses. Parallelization is a key technique for reducing the time required for large-scale sequence analyses. The three calculation stages, all-to-all comparison, progressive alignment and iterative refinement, of the MAFFT MSA program were parallelized using the POSIX Threads library. Two natural parallelization strategies (best-first and simple hill-climbing) were implemented for the iterative refinement stage. Based on comparisons of the objective scores and benchmark scores between the two approaches, we selected a simple hill- climbing approach as the default.