Pesole G, Grillo G, Larizza A, Liuni S
Dipartimento di Fisiologia e Biochimica Generali, Università di Milano, Italy.
Brief Bioinform. 2000 Sep;1(3):236-49. doi: 10.1093/bib/1.3.236.
The crucial role of the non-coding portion of genomes is now widely acknowledged. In particular, mRNA untranslated regions are involved in many post-transcriptional regulatory pathways that control mRNA localisation, stability and translation efficiency. A review is given of the most recent research works on the functional characterisation of eukaryotic mRNA untranslated regions. In order to make possible a systematic and detailed sequence analysis of mRNA untranslated regions (UTRs), a non-redundant database of metazoan mRNA untranslated sequences annotated for the occurrence of specific functional elements, UTRdb, was devised. These elements, whose consensus structure has been devised on the basis of experimental assays and of comparative analyses, have been collected in the UTRsite database. A suitable pattern-matching software has been devised to search UTRsite patterns in user-submitted sequences, also assessing their statistical significance. Structural, compositional and evolutionary features of untranslated sequences of metazoan mRNAs have been investigated showing peculiar intra- and interspecific patterns.
基因组非编码部分的关键作用如今已得到广泛认可。特别是，mRNA非翻译区参与了许多控制mRNA定位、稳定性和翻译效率的转录后调控途径。本文综述了关于真核生物mRNA非翻译区功能特征的最新研究成果。为了能够对mRNA非翻译区（UTR）进行系统而详细的序列分析，设计了一个后生动物mRNA非翻译序列的非冗余数据库UTRdb，该数据库标注了特定功能元件的出现情况。这些元件的共有结构是基于实验分析和比较分析设计的，已被收集到UTRsite数据库中。还设计了一种合适的模式匹配软件，用于在用户提交的序列中搜索UTRsite模式，并评估其统计学意义。对后生动物mRNA非翻译序列的结构、组成和进化特征进行了研究，揭示了独特的种内和种间模式。
