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Consensus Folding of Unaligned RNA Sequences Revisited

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Book cover Research in Computational Molecular Biology (RECOMB 2005)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNBI,volume 3500))

Abstract

As one of the earliest problems in computational biology, RNA secondary structure prediction (sometimes referred to as “RNA folding”) problem has attracted attention again, thanking to the recent discoveries of many novel non-coding RNA molecules. The two common approaches to this problem are de novo prediction of RNA secondary structure based on energy minimization and “consensus folding” approach (computing the common secondary structure for a set of unaligned RNA sequences). Consensus folding algorithms work well when the correct seed alignment is part of the input to the problem. However, seed alignment itself is a challenging problem for diverged RNA families.

In this paper, we propose a novel framework to predict the common secondary structure for unaligned RNA sequences. By matching putative stacks in RNA sequences, we make use of both primary sequence information and thermodynamic stability for prediction at the same time. We show that our method can predict the correct common RNA secondary structures even when we are only given a limited number of unaligned RNA sequences, and it outperforms current algorithms in sensitivity and accuracy.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Dept. of Computer Science and Engineering, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA, 92093, USA

    Vineet Bafna & Shaojie Zhang

  2. School of Informatics and Center for Genomics and Bioinformatics, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, 47408, USA

    Haixu Tang

Authors
  1. Vineet Bafna
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  2. Haixu Tang
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  3. Shaojie Zhang
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Human Genome Center, Institute of Medical Science, University of Tokyo, 4-6-1 Shirokanedai, 108-8639, Minato-ku, Tokyo, Japan

    Satoru Miyano

  2. Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, 320 Charles Street, 02141-2023, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Jill Mesirov

  3. Computational Genomics Laboratory, Department of Bioengineering, Boston University, 44 Cummington St., 02215, Boston, MA, USA

    Simon Kasif

  4. Center for Molecular Biology and Computer Sciecne Department, Brown University, 115 Waterman St., 02912, Providence, RI, USA

    Sorin Istrail

  5. University of California, San Diego, USA

    Pavel A. Pevzner

  6. Department of Molecular and Computational Biology, University of Southern California, 1050 Childs Way, 90089-2910, Los Angeles, CA, USA

    Michael Waterman

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© 2005 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Bafna, V., Tang, H., Zhang, S. (2005). Consensus Folding of Unaligned RNA Sequences Revisited. In: Miyano, S., Mesirov, J., Kasif, S., Istrail, S., Pevzner, P.A., Waterman, M. (eds) Research in Computational Molecular Biology. RECOMB 2005. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 3500. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11415770_13

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11415770_13

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-25866-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-31950-4

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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