Good text or video explaining what sequence alignment is to an undergrad

Question

[devenvyas]

I am working with an undergrad, and I need something to explain what multiple sequence alignment is without going too technical into the mathematics behind it.

She is going to align mitochondrial genome sequences for phylogenetic analysis.

[devenvyas]

Thanks but these are a bit tangential and too technical from what I looking for. I just need to explain to her the concept of aligning multiple sequences from the same locus together (i.e., human mitochondrial genomes), so she can create a sequence alignment using MAFFT to be used in phylogenetic analysis. I think I am just going to show her an old alignment in Geneious and talk her through it.

Answer 1

[Denise CS]

Check Andrew Cowley's materials on the subject for a course he delivered at Cambridge not long ago. If you re-use some of these, please acknowledge the original source.

[Daniel]

This is really good. Jump to Slide 50 in the ppt to get to the examples.

Answer 2

[GenoMax]

Alex Baxevanis's annual talks @NHGRI:
and

If you want something more basic

Other videos in the series are here.