  Although computationally aligning sequence is a crucial step in the vast
majority of comparative genomics studies our understanding of alignment biases
still needs to be improved. To infer true structural or homologous regions
computational alignments need further evaluation. It has been shown that the
accuracy of aligned positions can drop substantially in particular around gaps.
Here we focus on re-evaluation of score-based alignments with affine gap
penalty costs. We exploit their relationships with pair hidden Markov models
and develop efficient algorithms by which to identify gaps which are
significant in terms of length and multiplicity. We evaluate our statistics
with respect to the well-established structural alignments from SABmark and
find that indel reliability substantially increases with their significance in
particular in worst-case twilight zone alignments. This points out that our
statistics can reliably complement other methods which mostly focus on the
reliability of match positions.
