title: Informatics challenges in structured RNA.
abstract: The world of regulatory RNAs is fast expanding into mainstream molecular biology as both a subject of intense mechanistic study and as a tool for functional characterization. The RNA world is one of complex structures that carry out catalysis, sense metabolites and synthesize proteins. The dynamic and structural nature of RNAs presents a whole new set of informatics challenges to the computational community. The ability to relate structure and dynamics to function will be key to understanding this complex world. I review several important classes of structured RNAs that present our community with a series of biologically novel informatics challenges. I also review available informatics tools that have been recently developed in the field.
authors.affiliation: Department of Genetics, 300 Pasteur Drive, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305, USA. alain@helix.stanford.edu
authors.forename: Alain
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Laederach
mesh_terms: D019295:Computational Biology / Q000639:trends*; D008956:Models, Chemical; D008958:Models, Molecular; D009690:Nucleic Acid Conformation; D012313:RNA / Q000737:chemistry* / Q000235:genetics / Q000648:ultrastructure*; D034622:RNA Interference; D013329:Structure-Activity Relationship
chemical_list: D012313:RNA