Nucleic Acids Research Advance Access originally published online on June 12, 2007
Nucleic Acids Research 2007 35(Web Server issue):W314-W319; doi:10.1093/nar/gkm361
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Nucleic Acids Research, 2007, Vol. 35, No. suppl_2 W314-W319
© 2007 The Author(s)
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/uk/) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Articles |
RSRE: RNA structural robustness evaluator
1Beijing Institute of Radiation Medicine, Beijing 100850, China and 2College of Electro-Mechanic and Automation, National University of Defense Technology, Changsha, Hunan 410073, China
*To whom correspondence should be addressed. Tel: +86-10-66932211; Fax: +86-10-66932211; Email: sqwang{at}bmi.ac.cn Correspondence may also be addressed to Xiaochen Bo. Tel: +86-10-66932211; Fax: +86-10-66932211; Email: boxc{at}bmi.ac.cn
Received January 29, 2007. Revised April 3, 2007. Accepted April 25, 2007.
Biological robustness, defined as the ability to maintain stable functioning in the face of various perturbations, is an important and fundamental topic in current biology, and has become a focus of numerous studies in recent years. Although structural robustness has been explored in several types of RNA molecules, the origins of robustness are still controversial. Computational analysis results are needed to make up for the lack of evidence of robustness in natural biological systems. The RNA structural robustness evaluator (RSRE) web server presented here provides a freely available online tool to quantitatively evaluate the structural robustness of RNA based on the widely accepted definition of neutrality. Several classical structure comparison methods are employed; five randomization methods are implemented to generate control sequences; sub-optimal predicted structures can be optionally utilized to mitigate the uncertainty of secondary structure prediction. With a user-friendly interface, the web application is easy to use. Intuitive illustrations are provided along with the original computational results to facilitate analysis. The RSRE will be helpful in the wide exploration of RNA structural robustness and will catalyze our understanding of RNA evolution. The RSRE web server is freely available at http://biosrv1.bmi.ac.cn/RSRE/ or http://biotech.bmi.ac.cn/RSRE/.
The authors wish it to be known that, in their opinion, the first two authors should be regarded as joint First Authors