nocoRNAc: Characterization of non-coding RNAs in prokaryotes

Background: The interest in non-coding RNAs (ncRNAs) constantly rose during the past few years because of the wide spectrum of biological processes in which they are involved. This led to the discovery of numerous ncRNA genes across many species. However, for most organisms the non-coding transcriptome still remains unexplored to a great extent. Various experimental techniques for the identification of ncRNA transcripts are available, but as these methods are costly and time-consuming, there is a need for computational methods that allow the detection of functional RNAs in complete genomes in order to suggest elements for further experiments. Several programs for the genome-wide prediction of functional RNAs have been developed but most of them predict a genomic locus with no indication whether the element is transcribed or not. Results: We present NOCORNAc, a program for the genome-wide prediction of ncRNA transcripts in bacteria. NOCORNAc incorporates various procedures for the dete...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2011
• Where: BMCBI
• Authors: Alexander Herbig, Kay Nieselt
• Keywords: Artificial Intelligence, BMCBI 2011, Functional Rnas, Genome-wide Prediction, NcRNA