A consensus string is formed from a collection of strings by taking the most common symbol appearing at each position of the strings (see the table below). When constructed over a collection of genetic strings, the consensus string represents an average case organism over the collection.
For example, if we sequence the same chromosome in a number of different individuals of the same species, then taking the consensus of these chromosomes gives us a notion of an average human chromosome. In fact, this was the idea employed by the researchers who first drafted the human genome in 2001 by taking an average case of 12 individual genomes.
| A T C C A G C T | |
| G G G C A A C T | |
| A T G G A T C T | |
| DNA Strings | A A G C A A C C |
| T T G G A A C T | |
| A T G C C A T T | |
| A T G G C A C T | |
| A 5 1 0 0 5 5 0 0 | |
| Profile | C 0 0 1 4 2 0 6 1 |
| G 1 1 6 3 0 1 0 0 | |
| T 1 5 0 0 0 1 1 6 | |
| Consensus | A T G C A A C T |
