Toward an integrated RNA motif database

Abstract

In this paper we present the design and implementation of an RNA structural motif database, called RmotifDB. The structural motifs stored in RmotifDB come from three sources: (1) collected manually from biomedical literature; (2) submitted by scientists around the world; and (3) discovered by a wide variety of motif mining methods. We present here a motif mining method in detail. We also describe the interface and search mechanisms provided by RmotifDB as well as techniques used to integrate RmotifDB with the Gene Ontology. The RmotifDB system is fully operational and accessible on the Internet at http://datalab.njit.edu/bioinfo/ © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.