Motivation: Characterizing and comparing temporal gene-expression responses is an important computational task for answering a variety of questions in biological studies. Algorithms for aligning time series represent a valuable approach for such analyses. However, previous approaches to aligning gene-expression time series have assumed that all genes should share the same alignment. Our work is motivated by the need for methods that identify sets of genes that differ in similar ways between two time series, even when their expression profiles are quite different