Title
Fast and accurate clustering of noncoding RNAs using ensembles of sequence alignments and secondary structures.
Abstract
Clustering of unannotated transcripts is an important task to identify novel families of noncoding RNAs (ncRNAs). Several hierarchical clustering methods have been developed using similarity measures based on the scores of structural alignment. However, the high computational cost of exact structural alignment requires these methods to employ approximate algorithms. Such heuristics degrade the quality of clustering results, especially when the similarity among family members is not detectable at the primary sequence level.We describe a new similarity measure for the hierarchical clustering of ncRNAs. The idea is that the reliability of approximate algorithms can be improved by utilizing the information of suboptimal solutions in their dynamic programming frameworks. We approximate structural alignment in a more simplified manner than the existing methods. Instead, our method utilizes all possible sequence alignments and all possible secondary structures, whereas the existing methods only use one optimal sequence alignment and one optimal secondary structure. We demonstrate that this strategy can achieve the best balance between the computational cost and the quality of the clustering. In particular, our method can keep its high performance even when the sequence identity of family members is less than 60%.Our method enables fast and accurate clustering of ncRNAs. The software is available for download at http://bpla-kernel.dna.bio.keio.ac.jp/clustering/.
Year
DOI
Venue
2011
10.1186/1471-2105-12-S1-S48
BMC Bioinformatics
Keywords
Field
DocType
algorithms,bioinformatics,secondary structure,cluster analysis,structure alignment,microarrays,computational biology,hierarchical clustering,sequence alignment,noncoding rna
Sequence alignment,Hierarchical clustering,Cluster tree,Structural alignment,Biology,Software,Heuristics,Bioinformatics,Genetics,Cluster analysis,DNA microarray
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
12 Suppl 1
Suppl 1
1471-2105
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
15
0.54
9
Authors
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Yutaka Saito1150.54
Kengo Sato239222.46
Yasubumi Sakakibara376962.91