In bioinformatics, a sequence alignment is a way of arranging the sequences of DNA, RNA, or protein to identify regions of similarity that may be a consequence of functional, structural, or evolutionary relationships between the sequences. Aligned sequences of nucleotide or amino acid residues are typically represented as rows within a matrix. Gaps are inserted between the residues so that identical or similar characters are aligned in successive columns. Sequence alignments are also used for non-biological sequences such as calculating the distance cost between strings in a natural language, or to display financial data.

Clustal is a computer program used for multiple sequence alignment in bioinformatics. The software have gone through several iterations, with ClustalΩ (Omega) being the latest version as of 2011. It is available as standalone software, via a web interface, and through a server hosted by the European Bioinformatics Institute.