Selenoprofiles: A Computational Pipeline for Annotation of Selenoproteins

Selenoproteins contain selenocysteine (Sec or U), the 21st amino acid, inserted in response to an in-frame UGA codon. UGA normally terminates translation, but in selenoprotein mRNAs it is recoded to specify Sec insertion. For this reason, standard gene prediction programs fail to predict Sec codons, and selenoproteins are usually misannotated in protein databases and genome projects. Selenoprofiles is a computational pipeline able to correctly annotate selenoprotein genes in genomic sequences. This program uses a SECIS-independent approach, based on homology searches, and employs curated built-in profile alignments for all known selenoprotein families. Selenoprofiles constitutes the most accurate method for predicting selenoprotein genes belonging to known families.