For example, homeobox genes, which regulate embryonic development, are
present in a large variety of species. Although homeobox genes are very different
in different species, one region in each gene—called the homeodomain—
is highly conserved. The question arises how to find this conserved area and
ignore the areas that show little similarity. In 1981 Temple Smith andMichael
Waterman proposed a clever modification of the global sequence alignment
dynamic programming algorithm that solves the Local Alignment problem.