A Dynamic 3D Graphical Representation for RNA Structure Analysis and Its Application in Non-Coding RNA Classification

PLoS One. 2016 May 23;11(5):e0152238. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0152238. eCollection 2016.

Abstract

With the development of new technologies in transcriptome and epigenetics, RNAs have been identified to play more and more important roles in life processes. Consequently, various methods have been proposed to assess the biological functions of RNAs and thus classify them functionally, among which comparative study of RNA structures is perhaps the most important one. To measure the structural similarity of RNAs and classify them, we propose a novel three dimensional (3D) graphical representation of RNA secondary structure, in which an RNA secondary structure is first transformed into a characteristic sequence based on chemical property of nucleic acids; a dynamic 3D graph is then constructed for the characteristic sequence; and lastly a numerical characterization of the 3D graph is used to represent the RNA secondary structure. We tested our algorithm on three datasets: (1) Dataset I consisting of nine RNA secondary structures of viruses, (2) Dataset II consisting of complex RNA secondary structures including pseudo-knots, and (3) Dataset III consisting of 18 non-coding RNA families. We also compare our method with other nine existing methods using Dataset II and III. The results demonstrate that our method is better than other methods in similarity measurement and classification of RNA secondary structures.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Base Sequence
  • Computer Graphics*
  • Nucleic Acid Conformation*
  • Phylogeny
  • RNA, Untranslated / chemistry*
  • RNA, Viral / chemistry

Substances

  • RNA, Untranslated
  • RNA, Viral

Grants and funding

This work was partially supported by the National Science Foundation of China (No 11171088 to YZ), the Science and technology project of Hebei Province (No A2015208108 to YZ, No 1520341 to HH), the Science Fund of the Hebei University of Science and Technology Foundation (No 2014PT67 to YZ), the Hebei Province Foundation for Advanced Talents (No A201400121 to YZ), the Educational Commission of Hebei Province on of Humanities and Social Sciences (No SZ16180 to HH), the National Science and Technology Support Program (No 2012BAK11B05 to YF), and Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection, and Quarantine (AQSIQ) Support Program (No 2015IK037 to YF).