Finding instances of riboswitches and ribozymes by homology search of structured RNA with infernal

Abstract

In the genomics era, computational tools are essential to extract information from sequences and annotate them to allow easy access to genes. Fortunately, many of these tools are now part of standard pipelines. As a consequence, a cornucopia of genomic features is available in multiple databases. Nevertheless, as novel genomes are sequenced and new structured RNAs are discovered, homology searches and additional analyses need to be performed. In this chapter, we propose simple ways of finding instances of riboswitches and ribozymes in databases or in unannotated genomes, as well as ways of finding variants that deviate from the typical consensus. © Springer Science+Business Media New York 2014.