Hi,

My question may seem so simple. Could you tell me what is the difference between aligning and mapping the short reads to the reference genome?

And also what is the difference between Pairwise alignment, Multiple sequence alignment and Short-Read Sequence Alignment?

Thanks
For your second question, pairwise alignment (e.g., Smith and Waterman) is between two sequences and multiple sequence alignment between more than 2 sequences (e.g., clustalW). Short read aligners are usually pairwise!  