Fig. 10

Longest (columns) subMSA obtained for different values of \(\alpha\) in the SARS-CoV-2 MSA with 50 sequences and 29903 columns. The number of columns (y-axis) shows the longest subMSA given that all vertical blocks with length at least \(\alpha\) (x-axis) are fixed. The curve shows how increasing the value of \(\alpha\) implies an increase of the number of columns in the longest subMSA. In particular, we call breakpoints of \(\alpha\) those values of \(\alpha\) that determines a change in length of the subMSA. This plot can help to decide a reasonable value of \(\alpha\) given the available resources. A picture of the MSA given these breakpoints is shown in  Fig. 11