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Updated: Jul 25, 2026

Analyzing and Building Nucleic Acid Structures with 3DNA
Published on: April 26, 2013
A general procedure for locating and analyzing protein-binding sequence motifs in nucleic acids
1Department of Biological Sciences, University of Maryland, Baltimore County, 1000 Hilltop Circle, Baltimore, MD 21250, USA.
Abstract:
In the last decade, two tools, one drawn from information theory and the other from artificial neural networks, have proven particularly useful in many different areas of sequence analysis. The work presented herein indicates that these two approaches can be joined in a general fashion to produce a very powerful search engine that is capable of locating members of a given nucleic acid sequence family in either local or global sequence searches. This program can, in turn, be queried for its definition of the motif under investigation, ranking each base in context for its contribution to membership in the motif family. In principle, the method used can be applied to any binding motif, including both DNA and RNA sequence families, given sufficient family size.
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