A Statistical Test for Conserved RNA Structure Shows Lack of Evidence for Structure in LncRNAs

Overview

Journal Nat Methods

Specialties Biomedical Engineering
Pathology

Date 2016 Nov 8

PMID 27819659

Citations 204

Authors

Elena Rivas

Jody Clements

Sean R Eddy

Affiliations

Soon will be listed here.

Abstract

Many functional RNAs have an evolutionarily conserved secondary structure. Conservation of RNA base pairing induces pairwise covariations in sequence alignments. We developed a computational method, R-scape (RNA Structural Covariation Above Phylogenetic Expectation), that quantitatively tests whether covariation analysis supports the presence of a conserved RNA secondary structure. R-scape analysis finds no statistically significant support for proposed secondary structures of the long noncoding RNAs HOTAIR, SRA, and Xist.

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