1. A method of detecting a consensus motif in a multitude of data sequences without reference to any prior known motif, the method comprising the steps of: obtaining the data sequences; identifying potential signal (PS) segments of interest in the data sequences without reference to any prior known motif, wherein each of the PS segments comprises a sequence of positions, each of the positions has a character taken from a given alphabet, and each of the data sequences includes one or more of the PS segments; carrying out comparison and alignment processes amongst the PS segments to extract the consensus motif, including the steps of selecting one of the PS segments from each of the data sequences, forming local alignments of the selected PS segments multiple times; from each of the local alignments of the selected PS segments, obtaining a majority substring s m , and using the majority substring to identify a putative consensus motif; determining the number of times each of the putative consensus motifs occurs on the data sequences; identifying one of the putative consensus motifs as the consensus motif based on said number of occurrences of each of the putative consensus motifs in the data sequences; and using one or more processing units, executing a consensus motif detection program, to perform the step of forming multiple local alignments of the selected PS segments.