RNA movies: visualizing RNA secondary structure spaces.

Abstract

RNA Movies is a system for the visualization of RNA secondary structure spaces. Its input is a script consisting of primary and secondary structure information. From this script, the system fully automatically generates animated graphical structure representations. In this way, it creates the impression of an RNA molecule exploring its own two-dimensional structure space. RNA Movies has been used to generate animations of a switching structure in the spliced leader RNA of Leptomonas collosoma and sequential foldings of potato spindle tuber viroid transcripts. Demonstrations of the animations mentioned in this paper can be viewed on our Bioinformatics web server under the following address: http://BiBiServ.TechFak.Uni-Bielefeld. DE/rnamovies/. The RNA Movies software is available upon request from the authors.