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Updated: Jun 24, 2026

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A Bioinformatics Pipeline for Investigating Molecular Evolution and Gene Expression using RNA-seq
Published on: May 28, 2021
Infernal 1.0: inference of RNA alignments
Eric P Nawrocki1, Diana L Kolbe, Sean R Eddy
1HHMI Janelia Farm Research Campus, Ashburn, VA 20147, USA. nawrockie@janelia.hhmi.org
Bioinformatics (Oxford, England)
|March 25, 2009
Summary
INFERNAL software builds RNA secondary structure profiles, known as covariance models (CMs). These models identify homologous RNAs and generate new sequence- and structure-based alignments in databases.
Area of Science:
- Bioinformatics
- Computational Biology
- Genomics
Background:
- INFERNAL is a freely licensed (GNU GPLv3) software package.
- Source code, documentation, and benchmarks are available at http://infernal.janelia.org.
- The software is designed for POSIX-compliant operating systems like Linux and Mac OS/X.
Purpose of the Study:
- To introduce INFERNAL, a tool for analyzing RNA sequences and structures.
- To enable the creation of consensus RNA secondary structure profiles (covariance models).
- To facilitate searching nucleic acid sequence databases for homologous RNAs.
Main Methods:
- Building consensus RNA secondary structure profiles (covariance models).
- Utilizing covariance models to search large nucleic acid sequence databases.
- Generating novel sequence- and structure-based multiple sequence alignments.
Main Results:
- Development of a robust method for RNA homology searching.
- Creation of accurate covariance models for RNA families.
- Enabling the construction of structure-aware multiple sequence alignments.
Conclusions:
- INFERNAL effectively builds covariance models for RNA secondary structures.
- The software enables efficient searching of sequence databases for homologous RNAs.
- INFERNAL aids in creating new sequence- and structure-based multiple sequence alignments.
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