Mining Structure Elements from RNA Structure Data, and Visualizing Structure Elements

Most currently known molecular structures were determined by X-ray crystallography or Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR). These methods generate a large amount of structure data, even far small molecules, and consist mainly of three-dimensional atomic coordinates. These are useful for analyzing molecular structure, but structure elements at higher level are also needed for a complete understanding of structure, and especially for structure prediction. Computational approaches exist for identifying secondary structural elements in proteins from atomic coordinates. However, similar methods have not been developed for RNA due in part to the very small amount of structure data so far available, and extracting the structural elements of RNA requires substantial manual work. Since the number of three-dimensional RNA structures is increasing, a more systematic and automated method is needed. We have developed a set of algorithms for recognizing secondary and tertiary structural elements in RNA molecules and in the protein-RNA structures in protein data banks (PDB). The present work represents the first attempt at extracting RNA structure elements from atomic coordinates in structure databases. The regularities in the structure elements revealed by the algorithms should provide useful information for predicting the structure of RNA molecules bound to proteins.