Bioinformatics Advance Access originally published online on June 21, 2005
Bioinformatics 2005 21(16):3352-3359; doi:10.1093/bioinformatics/bti550
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MARNA: multiple alignment and consensus structure prediction of RNAs based on sequence structure comparisons
Department of Bioinformatics, Institute of Computer Science, Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena Ernst-Abbe Platz 2, 07743 Jena, Germany
*To whom correspondence should be addressed.
Motivation: Due to the importance of considering secondary structures in aligning functional RNAs, several pairwise sequencestructure alignment methods have been developed. They use extended alignment scores that evaluate secondary structure information in addition to sequence information. However, two problems for the multiple alignment step remain. First, how to combine pairwise sequencestructure alignments into a multiple alignment and second, how to generate secondary structure information for sequences whose explicit structural information is missing.
Results: We describe a novel approach for multiple alignment of RNAs (MARNA) taking into consideration both the primary and the secondary structures. It is based on pairwise sequencestructure comparisons of RNAs. From these sequencestructure alignments, libraries of weighted alignment edges are generated. The weights reflect the sequential and structural conservation. For sequences whose secondary structures are missing, the libraries are generated by sampling low energy conformations. The libraries are then processed by the T-Coffee system, which is a consistency based multiple alignment method. Furthermore, we are able to extract a consensus-sequence and -structure from a multiple alignment. We have successfully tested MARNA on several datasets taken from the Rfam database.
Availability: MARNA can be used online on our webpage www.bio.inf.uni-jena.de/Software/MARNA/index.html
Contact: backofen{at}inf.uni-jena.de
Received on April 1, 2005; revised on June 16, 2005; accepted on June 16, 2005
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