Downloaded from rnajournal.cshlp.org on September 26, 2021 - Published by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press ES Wright 1 1 TITLE 2 RNAconTest: Comparing tools for non-coding RNA multiple sequence alignment based on 3 structural consistency 4 Running title: RNAconTest: benchmarking comparative RNA programs 5 Author: Erik S. Wright1,* 6 1 Department of Biomedical Informatics, University of Pittsburgh (Pittsburgh, PA) 7 * Corresponding author: Erik S. Wright (
[email protected]) 8 Keywords: Multiple sequence alignment, Secondary structure prediction, Benchmark, non- 9 coding RNA, Consensus secondary structure 10 Downloaded from rnajournal.cshlp.org on September 26, 2021 - Published by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press ES Wright 2 11 ABSTRACT 12 The importance of non-coding RNA sequences has become increasingly clear over the past 13 decade. New RNA families are often detected and analyzed using comparative methods based on 14 multiple sequence alignments. Accordingly, a number of programs have been developed for 15 aligning and deriving secondary structures from sets of RNA sequences. Yet, the best tools for 16 these tasks remain unclear because existing benchmarks contain too few sequences belonging to 17 only a small number of RNA families. RNAconTest (RNA consistency test) is a new 18 benchmarking approach relying on the observation that secondary structure is often conserved 19 across highly divergent RNA sequences from the same family. RNAconTest scores multiple 20 sequence alignments based on the level of consistency among known secondary structures 21 belonging to reference sequences in their output alignment. Similarly, consensus secondary 22 structure predictions are scored according to their agreement with one or more known structures 23 in a family.