Analysis of structural strand asymmetry in non-coding RNAs

Jiayu Wen*, Georg F. Weiller, Brian J. Parker

*Corresponding author for this work

    Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

    1 Citation (Scopus)

    Abstract

    Many RNA functions are determined by their specific secondary and tertiary structures. These structures are folded by the canonical G::C and A::U base pairings as well as by the non-canonical G::U complementary bases. G::U base pairings in RNA secondary structures may induce structural asymmetries between the transcribed and non-transcribed strands in their corresponding DNA sequences. This is likely so because the corresponding C::A nucleotides of the complementary strand do not pair. As a consequence, the secondary structures that form from a genomic sequence depend on the strand transcribed. We explore this idea to investigate the size and significance of both global and local secondary structure formation differentials in several non-coding RNA families and mRNAs. We show that both thermodynamic stability of global RNA structures in the transcribed strand and RNA structure strand asymmetry are statistically stronger than that in randomized versions preserving the same di-nucleotide base composition and length, and is especially pronounced in microRNA precursors. We further show that a measure of local structural strand asymmetry within a fixed window size, as could be used in detecting and characterizing transcribed regions in a full genome scan, can be used to predict the transcribed strand across ncRNA families.

    Original languageEnglish
    Title of host publicationProceedings of 6th Asia-Pacific Bioinformatics Conference, APBC 2008
    Pages187-198
    Number of pages12
    Publication statusPublished - 2008
    Event6th Asia-Pacific Bioinformatics Conference, APBC 2008 - Kyoto, Japan
    Duration: 14 Jan 200817 Jan 2008

    Publication series

    NameSeries on Advances in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology
    Volume6
    ISSN (Print)1751-6404

    Conference

    Conference6th Asia-Pacific Bioinformatics Conference, APBC 2008
    Country/TerritoryJapan
    CityKyoto
    Period14/01/0817/01/08

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