Collecting and Characterizing RNA Molecules with Known Secondary Structure

RNAs are important elements in the metabolism of all organisms. The function of many RNAs is crucially dependent on their structure. Secondary structure is one of the most important factors determining 3d-structure, and functions. Having a more in-depth knowledge about the secondary structure of RNAs would provide researchers a better insight for understanding their functionality. In the last two decades, numerous approaches have been developed that try to predict the secondary structure of an RNA sequence and pairs of RNA molecules. The work presented in this paper is an attempt to provide researchers with a better understanding of the secondary structure of various RNA types and possibly improve the methods for prediction of secondary structures. We assembled a database containing RNA molecules with their known secondary structures and integrated it with an existent RNA Structure Analyzer. The integration of the aforementioned tools provides structural statistics for the molecules in the database and also characterizes the properties of various types of biological RNA structures.