Colorstock, SScolor, Ratón: RNA alignment visualization tools.

Abstract

Interactive examination of RNA multiple alignments for covariant mutations is a useful step in non-coding RNA sequence analysis. We present three parallel implementations of an RNA visualization metaphor: Colorstock, a command-line script using ANSI terminal color; SScolor, a Perl script that generates static HTML pages; and Ratón, an AJAX web application generating dynamic HTML. Each tool can be used to color RNA alignments by secondary structure and to visually highlight compensatory mutations in stems. All source code is freely available under the GPL. The source code can be downloaded and a prototype of Ratón can be accessed at http://biowiki.org/RnaAlignmentViewers.