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Graphical Methods In Rna Structure Matching, Jiajie Huang

Open Access Dissertations

Eukaryotic genomes are pervasively transcribed; almost every base can be found in an RNA transcript. This is a surprising observation since most of the genome does not encode proteins. This RNA must serve an important regulatory function – important because producing non-coding RNA is an energy intensive process, and in the absence of strong selection one would expect it to disappear.

RNA families with common functions have specifically conserved structural motifs, which are directly related to the functional roles of RNA in catalysis and regulation. Because the conserved structures depend on base-pairing, similar RNA structures may have little or no …