Patent ID: 8494785

Claim:
A method for constructing a consensus sequence from an alignment of a plurality of nucleic acid sequences, the method comprising: generating a frequency matrix comprising the frequency of each base at each position in the alignment; creating an information matrix comprising the amount of information provided by each base at each position in the alignment; and calculating an information score for each of the plurality of nucleic acid sequences; iterating over each position in the alignment and for each position: (a) calculating base frequencies and determining a highest frequency base; (b) if the highest frequency base's frequency is higher than a frequency threshold, assigning the highest frequency base to the consensus sequence; and (c) if the highest frequency base's frequency is lower than the frequency threshold, removing a base corresponding to a nucleic acid sequence with a lowest information score and returning to (a); and performing a restriction fragment length polymorphism (RFLP) fingerprint of the constructed consensus sequence in silico.