A local multiple alignment method for detection of non-coding RNA sequences

Motivation: Non-coding RNAs (ncRNAs) show a unique evolutionary process in which the substitutions of distant bases are correlated in order to conserve the secondary structure of the ncRNA molecule. Therefore, the multiple alignment method for the detection of ncRNAs should take into account both the primary sequence and the secondary structure. Recently, there has been intense focus on multiple alignment investigations for the detection of ncRNAs; however, most of the proposed methods are designed for global multiple alignments. For this reason, these methods are not appropriate to identify locally conserved ncRNAs among genomic sequences. A more efficient local multiple alignment method for the detection of ncRNAs is required. Results: We propose a new local multiple alignment method for the detection of ncRNAs. This method uses a local multiple alignment construction procedure inspired by ProDA, which is a local multiple aligner program for protein sequences with repeated and shuffled elements. To align sequences based on secondary structure information, we propose a new alignment model which incorporates secondary structure features. We define the conditional probability of an alignment via a conditional random field and use a γ-centroid estimator to align sequences. The locally aligned subsequences are clustered into blocks of approximately globally alignable subsequences between pairwise alignments. Finally, these blocks are multiply aligned via MXSCARNA. In benchmark experiments, we demonstrate the high ability of the implemented software, SCARNA_LM, for local multiple alignment for the detection of ncRNAs. Availability: The C++ source code for SCARNA_LM and its experimental datasets are available at http://www.ncrna.org/software/scarna_lm/download. Contact: scarna@m.aist.go.jp Supplementary information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.