Laederach Alain
Department of Genetics, 300 Pasteur Drive, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305, USA.
Brief Bioinform. 2007 Sep;8(5):294-303. doi: 10.1093/bib/bbm026. Epub 2007 Jul 4.
The world of regulatory RNAs is fast expanding into mainstream molecular biology as both a subject of intense mechanistic study and as a tool for functional characterization. The RNA world is one of complex structures that carry out catalysis, sense metabolites and synthesize proteins. The dynamic and structural nature of RNAs presents a whole new set of informatics challenges to the computational community. The ability to relate structure and dynamics to function will be key to understanding this complex world. I review several important classes of structured RNAs that present our community with a series of biologically novel informatics challenges. I also review available informatics tools that have been recently developed in the field.
调控RNA的世界正迅速融入主流分子生物学领域,成为深入进行机制研究的对象以及功能表征的工具。RNA世界是一个由执行催化、感知代谢物和合成蛋白质等功能的复杂结构所构成的世界。RNA的动态性和结构特性给计算领域带来了一系列全新的信息学挑战。将结构与动态性和功能联系起来的能力将是理解这个复杂世界的关键。我将综述几类重要的结构化RNA,它们给我们这个领域带来了一系列生物学上全新的信息学挑战。我还将综述该领域最近开发的可用信息学工具。