UniOTalign: A Global Matching Framework for Protein Alignment via Optimal Transport

Abstract

Protein sequence alignment is a cornerstone of bioinformatics, traditionally approached using dynamic programming (DP) algorithms that find an optimal sequential path. This paper introduces UniOTalign, a novel framework that recasts alignment from a fundamentally different perspective: global matching via Optimal Transport (OT). Instead of finding a path, UniOTalign computes an optimal flow or transport plan between two proteins, which are represented as distributions of residues in a high-dimensional feature space. We leverage pre-trained Protein Language Models (PLMs) to generate rich, context-aware embeddings for each residue. The core of our method is the Fused Unbalanced Gromov-Wasserstein (FUGW) distance, which finds a correspondence that simultaneously minimizes feature dissimilarity and preserves the internal geometric structure of the sequences. This approach naturally handles sequences of different lengths and is particularly powerful for aligning proteins with nonsequential similarities, such as domain shuffling or circular permutations, which are challenging for traditional DP methods. UniOTalign therefore offers a new, mathematically principled, global matching paradigm for protein alignment, moving beyond the limitations of path-finding algorithms.