Position weight matrix
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This article is about Bioinformatics. For the disease in horses known by the acronym "PSSM", see Equine polysaccharide storage myopathy.
A position weight matrix (PWM), also known as a position-specific weight matrix (PSWM) or position-specific scoring matrix (PSSM), is a commonly used representation of motifs (patterns) in biological sequences.
PWMs are often derived from a set of aligned sequences that are thought to be functionally related and have become an important part of many software tools for computational motif discovery.