Structural Alignment of RNA with Complex Pseudoknot Structure

Structural Alignment of RNA with Complex Pseudoknot Structure

The secondary structure of an ncRNA molecule is known to play an important role in its biological functions. Aligning a known ncRNA to a target candidate to determine the sequence and structural similarity helps in identifying de novo ncRNA molecules that are in the same family of the known ncRNA. However, existing algorithms cannot handle complex pseudoknot structures which are found in nature...

RNA structure and structural alignment

Dynamic programming based RNA pseudoknot alignment

Pseudoknots are certain structural motifs of RNA molecules. In this thesis we consider the problem of RNA pseudoknot alignment. Most current approaches either discard pseudoknots in order to be efficient or rely on heuristics generating only approximate solutions. This work focuses on dynamic programming based alignment methods and proposes two new approaches for an exact solution of the alignm...

Structural Alignment of RNA with Triple Helix Structure

Structural alignment is useful in identifying members of ncRNAs. Existing tools are all based on the secondary structures of the molecules. There is evidence showing that tertiary interactions (the interaction between a single-stranded nucleotide and a base-pair) in triple helix structures are critical in some functions of ncRNAs. In this article, we address the problem of structural alignment ...

Multiple Structural RNA Alignment with Lagrangian Relaxation

In contrast to proteins, many classes of functionally related RNA molecules show a rather weak sequence conservation but instead a fairly well conserved secondary structure. Hence it is clear, that any method that relates RNA sequences in form of (multiple) alignments should take structural features into account. Since multiple alignments are of great importance for subsequent data analysis, re...