Jossinet Fabrice, Ludwig Thomas E, Westhof Eric
Architecture et Réactivité de l'ARN, Université Louis Pasteur, Institut de Biologie Moléculaire et Cellulaire, CNRS, F-67084 Strasbourg, France.
Curr Opin Microbiol. 2007 Jun;10(3):279-85. doi: 10.1016/j.mib.2007.05.010. Epub 2007 Jun 4.
The range of functions ascribed to RNA molecules has grown considerably during recent years. Consequently, the analysis and comparison of RNA sequences have become recurrent tasks in molecular biology. Because the biological function of an RNA is expressed more by its folded architecture than by its sequence, original computational tools adapted to the multifaceted RNA functions have to be developed. Such tools, recently published, enable a user to solve classical problems related to RNA research: constructing 'structural' multiple alignments, inferring complete structures and structural motifs from RNA alignments, or searching structural homology in genomic databases.
近年来，归因于RNA分子的功能范围大幅扩展。因此，RNA序列的分析和比较已成为分子生物学中的常见任务。由于RNA的生物学功能更多地通过其折叠结构而非序列来体现，所以必须开发适用于RNA多种功能的原始计算工具。最近发表的此类工具使用户能够解决与RNA研究相关的经典问题：构建“结构”多重比对、从RNA比对中推断完整结构和结构基序，或在基因组数据库中搜索结构同源性。
