Axel Mosig | PubMed Health

PubMed2007

RNAs everywhere: genome-wide annotation of structured RNAs.

Starting with the discovery of microRNAs and the advent of genome-wide transcriptomics, non-protein-coding transcripts have moved from a fringe topic to a central field research in molecular biology. In this contribution we review the state of the art of "computational RNomics", i.e., the bioinformatics approaches to genome-wide RNA annotation. Instead of rehashing results from recently published surveys in detail, we focus here on the open problem in the field, namely (functional) annotation of the plethora of putative RNAs. A series of exploratory studies are used to provide non-trivial examples for the discussion of some of the difficulties.

Biological Evolution↗

PubMed2006

Fragrep: an efficient search tool for fragmented patterns in genomic sequences.

Many classes of non-coding RNAs (ncRNAs; including Y RNAs, vault RNAs, RNase P RNAs, and MRP RNAs, as well as a novel class recently discovered in Dictyostelium discoideum) can be characterized by a pattern of short but well-conserved sequence elements that are separated by poorly conserved regions of sometimes highly variable lengths. Local alignment algorithms such as BLAST are therefore ill-suited for the discovery of new homologs of such ncRNAs in genomic sequences. The Fragrep tool instead implements an efficient algorithm for detecting the pattern fragments that occur in a given order. For each pattern fragment, the mismatch tolerance and bounds on the length of the intervening sequences can be specified separately. Furthermore, matches can be ranked by a statistically well-motivated scoring scheme.

Algorithms↗