TARNAS, a TrAnslator for RNA Secondary Structure Formats
摘要
RNAs are single-stranded molecules that fold into themselves, determining a complex shape to perform their biological functions. Considering the chemical bonds established, such shapes can be abstracted into secondary structures, which are tractable from a computational point of view and encode valuable biological information. The analysis of such structures, including comparison and classification, plays a fundamental role in different biological studies. Unfortunately, the available tools take secondary structures as input using different formats, making the translation among different them a necessary step in every analysis. In this work, we propose TARNAS, a software that permits the translation of secondary structure formats, including BPSEQ, CT, Dot-Bracket, RNAML, FASTA (only primary structure) and Arc-annotated Sequence. TARNAS also allows the abstraction of RNA secondary structures into three views, namely Core, Core Plus and Shape. Finally, TARNAS permits to delete or retain comments, blank lines and headers of the files. TARNAS is developed as a standalone desktop application and as a web app. The tool, developed in Java, is available as a standalone application at https://github.com/bdslab/TARNAS or as a web application at https://bdslab.unicam.it/tarnas/ . The standalone version allows the processing of large sets of RNA secondary structures in a batch fashion, whereas the web version translates one molecule at a time.