trimAl can consider several parameters, alone or in multiple combinations, in order to select the most-reliable positions in the alignment. These include the proportion of sequences with a gap, the level of residue similarity and, if several alignments for the same set of sequences are provided, the consistency level of columns among alignments. Moreover, trimAl allows to manually select a set of columns and sequences to be removed from the alignment.
trimAl implements a series of automated algorithms that trim the alignment searching for optimum thresholds based on inherent characteristics of the input alignment, to be used so that the signal-to-noise ratio after alignment trimming phase is increased.
Among trimAl’s additional features, trimAl allows getting the complementary alignment (columns that were trimmed), to compute statistics from the alignment, to select the output file format , to get a summary of trimAl’s trimming in HTML and SVG formats, and many other options.