A computational method that lines up, as a set of rows of text, three or more sequences (of DNA, RNA, or proteins) to maximize the identity of overlapping positions while minimizing mismatches and gaps. The resulting set of aligned sequences is also known as a multiple alignment. Multiple alignments may be used to study evolutionary information about the conservation of bases at specific positions in the same gene across different organisms or about the conservation of regulatory motifs across a set of genes. In NGS, multiple alignment methods are used to reduce a set of overlapping reads that have been mapped to a region of a reference genome by pairwise alignment, to a single consensus sequence; and also to aid in the de novo assembly of novel genomes from sets of overlapping reads created by fragment assembly methods.