Currently, there are two major heuristic algorithms for performing database searches: BLAST and FASTA.
Currently, there are two major heuristic algorithms for performing database searches: BLAST and FASTA. Correct Answer True
These methods are not guaranteed to find the optimal alignment or true homologs, but are 50–100 times faster than dynamic programming. The increased computational speed comes at a moderate expense of sensitivity and specificity of the search, which is easily tolerated by working molecular biologists. Both programs can provide a reasonably good indication of sequence similarity by identifying similar sequence segments.