METHOD OF IDENTIFICATION OF FUNCTIONAL RNA MOTIFS IN GENOMIC DATA BASES

摘要

The present invention relates to sequence data basesand more particularly, to the use of the information in these data basesto identify RNA motifs therein. More particularly, the invention relates tothe use of a search engine which compares both primary and secondarystructure of RNAs to identify functional RNA motifs in sequence databases and to methods of identification of functionally relevant RNA motifsin sequence data bases using such search engines. The presentinvention further relates to the identification of specific RNA structuralmotifs in the sequence data bases such as the tat-binding element(TBE), the Rev-binding element (RBE), the hammerhead, a UV-loopmotif, a neomycin binding motif and a paromomycin binding motif. Inaddition, the present invention relates to the validation of the approach ofthe present invention for indentifying functionally relevant RNA motifs byshowing that a previously undiscovered RNA catalytic motif found in theSchistosome genome (DNA) sequence has catalytic activity.