Sketching and locality sensitive hashing techniques are used to speed up large-scale sequence alignment problems by avoiding all-pairs comparisons. Locality sensitive hashing maps similar sequences to the same "buckets" with high probability, allowing near neighbors to be identified quickly. Ordered minhash is a locality sensitive hashing method for edit distance that accounts for k-mer repetition, providing a better approximation of sequence similarity than regular minhash. These techniques enable faster genome assembly and database searches by prioritizing sequence pairs that are more likely to align.