title: A manually curated database of tetrapod mitochondrially encoded tRNA sequences and secondary structures.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  Mitochondrial tRNAs have been the subject of study for structural biologists interested in their secondary structure characteristics, evolutionary biologists have researched patterns of compensatory and structural evolution and medical studies have been directed towards understanding the basis of human disease. However, an up to date, manually curated database of mitochondrially encoded tRNAs from higher animals is currently not available.
  
  
  METHODS
  We obtained the complete mitochondrial sequence for 277 tetrapod species from GenBank and re-annotated all of the tRNAs based on a multiple alignment of each tRNA gene and secondary structure prediction made independently for each tRNA. The mitochondrial (mt) tRNA sequences and the secondary structure based multiple alignments are freely available as Supplemental Information online.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  We compiled a manually curated database of mitochondrially encoded tRNAs from tetrapods with completely sequenced genomes. In the course of our work, we reannotated more than 10% of all tetrapod mt-tRNAs and subsequently predicted the secondary structures of 6060 mitochondrial tRNAs. This carefully constructed database can be utilized to enhance our knowledge in several different fields including the evolution of mt-tRNA secondary structure and prediction of pathogenic mt-tRNA mutations. In addition, researchers reporting novel mitochondrial genome sequences should check their tRNA gene annotations against our database to ensure a higher level of fidelity of their annotation.
authors.affiliation: Institute for Information Transmission Problems RAS, Bolshoi Karetny pereulok 19, Moscow. konstantinpopadin@gmail.com
authors.forename: Konstantin Yu
authors.initials: KY
authors.lastname: Popadin
authors.forename: Leila A
authors.initials: LA
authors.lastname: Mamirova
authors.forename: Fyodor A
authors.initials: FA
authors.lastname: Kondrashov
mesh_terms: D000663:Amphibians / Q000235:genetics; D000818:Animals; D001483:Base Sequence; D030561:Databases, Nucleic Acid; D025061:Dinosaurs / Q000235:genetics; D054629:Genome, Mitochondrial; D006801:Humans; D008322:Mammals / Q000235:genetics; D009690:Nucleic Acid Conformation; D012343:RNA, Transfer / Q000145:classification / Q000235:genetics*; D016415:Sequence Alignment; D009626:Terminology as Topic
chemical_list: D012343:RNA, Transfer