Fft-Ns-I In Mafft

Question

[Aleksandr Levchuk]

In the MAFFT paper what does FFT-NS-i stand for?

I understand it's an iterative refinement method. FFT must be Fast Fourier transform. i must be iterative, but what is "NS"?

Answer 1

[Andreas]

Not sure what the abbreviation is actually supposed to mean, but it directly translates into the retree (tree iteration) option, i.e. NS2 is --retree 2. This table shows a list of all names and commands that are actually used.

Andreas

Answer 2

[pinocchio964]

Using the FFT algorithm and the normalized similarity matrix described above, input sequences are progressively aligned following the branching order of sequences in the guide tree. This method is hereafter referred to as FFT-NS-1.

So... NS means normalized similarity matrix. I think what it is maybe similar to Gramian matrix in linear algebra.