Colorstock, SScolor, Ratón: RNA alignment visualization tools

Bioinformatics. 2008 Feb 15;24(4):579-80. doi: 10.1093/bioinformatics/btm635. Epub 2008 Jan 24.

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.

Availability: 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.

Publication types

  • Research Support, N.I.H., Extramural
  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Base Sequence
  • Computational Biology / methods*
  • Molecular Sequence Data
  • RNA, Viral / genetics
  • Sequence Alignment / methods*
  • Sequence Analysis, RNA / methods*
  • Software*

Substances

  • RNA, Viral