The RNAmute web server for the mutational analysis of RNA secondary structures

RNA mutational analysis at the secondary-structure level can be useful to a wide-range of biological applications. It can be used to predict an optimal site for performing a nucleotide mutation at the single molecular level, as well as to analyze basic phenomena at the systems level. For the former, as more sequence modification experiments are performed that include site-directed mutagenesis to find and explore functional motifs in RNAs, a pre-processing step that helps guide in planning the experiment becomes vital. For the latter, mutations are generally accepted as a central mechanism by which evolution occurs, and mutational analysis relating to structure should gain a better understanding of system functionality and evolution. In the past several years, the program RNAmute that is structure based and relies on RNA secondary-structure prediction has been developed for assisting in RNA mutational analysis. It has been extended from single-point mutations to treat multiple-point mutations efficiently by initially calculating all suboptimal solutions, after which only the mutations that stabilize the suboptimal solutions and destabilize the optimal one are considered as candidates for being deleterious. The RNAmute web server for mutational analysis is available at http://www.cs.bgu.ac.il/∼xrnamute/XRNAmute.