Fast RNA-RNA Interaction Prediction Methods for Interaction Analysis of Transcriptome-Scale Large Datasets

Abstract

The computational prediction of RNA-RNA interactions has long been studied in RNA informatics. Most of the existing approaches focused on the interaction prediction of short RNAs in small datasets. However, in recent years, two fast prediction methods, RIsearch2 and RIblast, have been developed to predict transcriptome-scale interactions or long RNA interactions. The key idea of the software acceleration of these tools was the integration of a seed-and-extend method, which is used in fast sequence alignment tools, into RNA-RNA interaction prediction. As a result, the two software programs were ten to a thousand times faster than the existing tools; because of this acceleration, detection of genome-wide microRNA target sites or interaction partners of function-unknown long noncoding RNAs has become possible. In this review, we describe the basic concept of the algorithm, its applications, and the future perspectives of the fast RNA-RNA interaction prediction tools.