PREP-Mt: predictive RNA editor for plant mitochondrial genes

Background: In plants, RNA editing is a process that converts specific cytidines to uridines and uridines to cytidines in transcripts from virtually all mitochondrial protein-coding genes. There are thousands of plant mitochondrial genes in the sequence databases, but sites of RNA editing have not been determined for most. Accurate methods of RNA editing site prediction will be important in filling in this information gap and could reduce or even eliminate the need for experimental determination of editing sites for many sequences. Because RNA editing tends to increase protein conservation across species by "correcting" codons that specify unconserved amino acids, this principle can be used to predict editing sites by identifying positions where an RNA editing event would increase the conservation of a protein to homologues from other plants. PREP-Mt takes this approach to predict editing sites for any protein-coding gene in plant mitochondria. Results: To test the general a...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2005
• Where: BMCBI
• Authors: Jeffrey P. Mower
• Keywords: BMCBI 2005, Mitochondrial Protein-coding, Protein-coding Gene, RNA Editing