RNA structure framework: automated transcriptome-wide reconstruction of RNA secondary structures from high-throughput structure probing data

Abstract

Summary: The rapidly increasing number of discovered non-coding RNAs makes the understanding of their structure a key feature toward a deeper comprehension of gene expression regulation. Various enzymatic- and chemically- based approaches have been recently developed to allow whole-genome studies of RNA secondary structures. Several methods have been recently presented that allow high-throughput RNA structure probing (CIRS-seq, Structure-seq, SHAPE-seq, PARS, etc.) and unbiased structural inference of residues within RNAs in their native conformation. We here present an analysis toolkit, named RNA Structure Framework (RSF), which allows fast and fully-automated analysis of high-throughput structure probing data, from data pre-processing to whole-transcriptome RNA structure inference.

Availability and implementation: RSF is written in Perl and is freely available under the GPLv3 license from http://rsf.hugef-research.org.

Contact: salvatore.oliviero@hugef-torino.org

Supplementary information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.