Publications - Published papers
Please find below publications of our group. Currently, we list 565 papers. Some of the publications are in collaboration with the group of Sonja Prohaska and are also listed in the publication list for her individual group. Access to published papers (
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The tedious task of RNA homology search
Peter Menzel, Jan Gorodkin and Peter F. Stadler
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Status: Published
RNA 15:2075-2082 (2009)
Abstract
User driven <em>in silico</em> RNA homology search is still a
non-trivial task. In part this is the consequence of a
limited precision of the computational tools in spite of recent
exciting progress in this area, and to a certain extent computational
costs are still problematic in practice. An important, and as we argue
here, dominating issue is the dependence on good curated
(secondary) structural alignments of the RNAs. These are often hard to
obtain not so much because of an inherent limitation in the available
data, but because they require substantial manual curation, an effort
that is rarely acknowledged. Here, we qualitatively describe a realistic
scenario for the what a ``regular user'' (i.e., a non-expert in a
particular RNA family), can do in practice, and what kind of results
are likely to be achieved. Despite the indisputable advances in
computational RNA biology, the conclusion is discouraging: \prog{BLAST}
still works better or equally good as other methods unless extensive
expert knowledge on the RNA family is included. Homology search beyond
the reach of BLAST hence is not at all a routine task.
Keywords
RNA secondary structure prediction, non-coding RNA homology search, RNA structural alignments