Motivation: Comparison of RNA 3D structures can be used to infer functional relationship of RNA molecules. Most of the current RNA structure alignment programs are built on size-dependent scales, which complicate the interpretation of structure and functional relations. Meanwhile, the low speed prevents the programs from being applied to large-scale RNA structural database search.
Results: We developed an open-source algorithm, RNA-align, for RNA 3D structure alignment which has the structure similarity scaled by a size-independent and statistically interpretable scoring metric. Large-scale benchmark tests show that RNA-align significantly outperforms other state-of-the-art programs in both alignment accuracy and running speed. The major advantage of RNA-align lies at the quick convergence of the heuristic alignment iterations and the coarse-grained secondary structure assignment, both of which are crucial to the speed and accuracy of RNA structure alignments.
Availability and implementation: https://zhanglab.ccmb.med.umich.edu/RNA-align/.
Supplementary information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.
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