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Updated: Jun 2, 2026

An Assay for Quantifying Protein-RNA Binding in Bacteria
Published on: June 12, 2019
Local structural alignment of RNA with affine gap model
Thomas King-Fung Wong1, Brenda Wing-Yan Cheung, Tak-Wah Lam
1Department of Computer Science, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong. kfwong@cs.hku.hk.
Background:
Predicting new non-coding RNAs (ncRNAs) of a family can be done by aligning the potential candidate with a member of the family with known sequence and secondary structure. Existing tools either only consider the sequence similarity or cannot handle local alignment with gaps.
Results:
In this paper, we consider the problem of finding the optimal local structural alignment between a query RNA sequence (with known secondary structure) and a target sequence (with unknown secondary structure) with the affine gap penalty model. We provide the algorithm to solve the problem.
Conclusions:
Based on an experiment, we show that there are ncRNA families in which considering local structural alignment with gap penalty model can identify real hits more effectively than using global alignment or local alignment without gap penalty model.
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