| More docs on the ARB website. See also index of helppages. Last update on 27. Jun 2017 .

Main topics:

- ARB: a Short Introduction
- Glossary

Related topics:

- Select an Alignment
- Alignment Administration
- Protein Alignments

# What is an Alignment ?

- DESCRIPTION
- NOTES

## DESCRIPTION

### Different alignments assigned to the same species (eg. sequences of different genes) can be stored in one database. The name of the currently accessible alignment (ali_*) is shown in the 3rd broad rectangular button in the top area of the ARB_NT window.

### The sequences themselves are not stored in the 'ali_*' field of a species, but in the subfield 'data' of 'ali_*' 'ali_*' is a container field: it holds no data except other data fields (like a directory in a file system).

## NOTES

### There is a special alignment called 'ali_genom' which is used for full genome databases. It's called an alignment because it fits into our database structure, but it should NOT contain any gaps.