The art of editing RNA structural alignments

Abstract

Manual editing of RNA structural alignments may be considered more art than science, since it still requires an expert biologist to take multiple levels of information into account and be slightly creative when constructing high-quality alignments. Even though the task is rather tedious, it is rewarded by great insight into the evolution of structure and function of your favorite RNA molecule. In this chapter I will review the methods and considerations that go into constructing RNA structural alignments at the secondary and tertiary structure level; introduce software, databases, and algorithms that have proven useful in semiautomating the work process; and suggest future directions towards full automatization.