RNAhub - an automated pipeline to search and align RNA homologs with secondary structure assessment

Abstract

The complexity in the generation of RNA multiple sequence alignments and assessment of the accuracy of such alignments contributes to the challenges in the utilization of RNA alignments in diverse integrative methods. RNAhub is a freely available user-friendly web server for a reliable generation of RNA multiple sequence alignments and the detection of the presence of structural RNA utilizing evolutionary information. This web-based tool, developed by the integration of existing computational approaches, takes an RNA sequence as input and automatically retrieves and aligns sequences homologous to the input (query) RNA sequence through an iterative and structure-agnostic approach. Based on the alignment, this tool statistically assesses whether the query RNA sequence has a conserved RNA structure using covariation analysis. The web server allows the user to efficiently search the sequence of interest against carefully curated, ready-to-use genomic databases to produce a multiple sequence alignment. Using this alignment, our tool either detects the presence of a conserved structural RNA, finds evidence against the presence of a conserved structure, or cannot make any assessment due to a lack of sequence diversity in the alignment. The web server is freely available at https://rnahub.org. Graphical Abstract O_FIG O_LINKSMALLFIG WIDTH=181 HEIGHT=200 SRC="FIGDIR/small/642701v3_ufig1.gif" ALT="Figure 1"> View larger version (30K): org.highwire.dtl.DTLVardef@540f6forg.highwire.dtl.DTLVardef@c15e53org.highwire.dtl.DTLVardef@117ced2org.highwire.dtl.DTLVardef@b679c_HPS_FORMAT_FIGEXP M_FIG C_FIG