NaRCiSuS

Structural genomics is a wide term describing the determination of a structure representation based on  information contained in the genome, and at present is almost exclusively limited to the proteins. Although in common understanding genetic information means “genes and their encoded protein products”, thousands of human genes produce transcripts which are biologically important but they do not produce proteins. Furthermore, even though the sequence of the human DNA is known by now, the meaning of the most of the sequences still remains unknown. It is very likely that a large amount of genes has been highly underestimated, mainly because the actual gene finders work well only for large, highly expressed, evolutionary conserved protein-coding genes. Most of those genome elements encode RNA from which transfer and ribosomal RNAs are the classical examples. But beside these well-known molecules there is a vast unknown world of tiny RNAs that might play a crucial role in a number of cellular processes. Those elements are named Noncoding RNAs (ncRNA) and they perform their function without transcription to the protein product. Here, we propose the development of the integrated bioinformatics platform that is specifically addressed for detecting, verifying, and classifying noncoding RNAs. This complex approach to “computational RNomics” will provide a pipeline which will be capable of detecting RNA motifs with low sequence conservation. It will also integrate the RNA motif prediction which should significantly improve the quality of the RNA homologues searching.