RNAz

We report an efficient method for detecting functional RNAs. The approach, which combines comparative sequence analysis and structure prediction, already has yielded excellent results for a small number of aligned sequences and is suitable for large-scale genomic screens. It consists of two basic components: (i) a measure for RNA secondary structure conservation based on computing a consensus secondary structure, and (ii) a measure for thermodynamic stability, which, in the spirit of a z score, is normalized with respect to both sequence length and base composition but can be calculated without sampling from shuffled sequences. Functional RNA secondary structures can be identified in multiple sequence alignments with high sensitivity and high specificity. We demonstrate that this approach is not only much more accurate than previous methods but also significantly faster. The method is implemented in the program rnaz, which can be downloaded from www.tbi.univie.ac.at/~wash/RNAz. We screened all alignments of length n > or = 50 in the Comparative Regulatory Genomics database, which compiles conserved noncoding elements in upstream regions of orthologous genes from human, mouse, rat, Fugu, and zebrafish. We recovered all of the known noncoding RNAs and cis-acting elements with high significance and found compelling evidence for many other conserved RNA secondary structures not described so far to our knowledge.[1]

Many non-coding RNA genes and cis-acting regulatory elements of mRNAs contain RNA secondary structures that are critical for their function. Such functional RNAs can be predicted on the basis of thermodynamic stability and evolutionary conservation. We present a web server that uses the RNAz algorithm to detect functional RNA structures in multiple alignments of nucleotide sequences. The server provides access to a complete and fully automatic analysis pipeline that allows not only to analyze single alignments in a variety of formats, but also to conduct complex screens of large genomic regions. Results are presented on a website that is illustrated by various structure representations and can be downloaded for local view. The web server is available at: rna.tbi.univie.ac.at/RNAz.[2]

RNAz is a widely used software package for de novo detection of structured noncoding RNAs in comparative genomics data. Four years of experience have not only demonstrated the applicability of the approach, but also helped us to identify limitations of the current implementation. RNAz 2.0 provides significant improvements in two respects: (1) The accuracy is increased by the systematic use of dinucleotide models. (2) Technical limitations of the previous version, such as the inability to handle alignments with more than six sequences, are overcome by increased training data and the usage of an entropy measure to represent sequence similarities. RNAz 2.0 shows a significantly lower false discovery rate on a dinucleotide background model than the previous version. Separate models for structural alignments provide an additional way to increase the predictive power. RNAz is open source software and can be obtained free of charge at: http://www.tbi.univie.ac.at/~wash/RNAz/[3]

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