Simultaneous alignment and folding of 28S rRNA sequences uncovers phylogenetic signal in structure variation

Secondary structure models of mitochondrial and nuclear (r)RNA sequences are frequently applied to aid the alignment of these molecules in phylogenetic analyses. Additionally, it is often speculated that structure variation of (r)RNA sequences might profitably be used as phylogenetic markers. The benefit of these approaches depends on the reliability of structure models. We used a recently developed approach to show that reliable inference of large (r)RNA secondary structures as a prerequisite of simultaneous sequence and structure alignment is feasible. The approach iteratively establishes local structure constraints of each sequence and infers fully folded individual structures by constrained MFE optimization. A comparison of structure edit distances of individual constraints and fully folded structures showed pronounced phylogenetic signal in fully folded structures. As model sequences we characterized secondary structures of 28S rRNA sequences of selected insects and examined their phylogenetic signal according to established phylogenetic hypotheses.