Question

Fichant and Burks (1991) described a program, tRNAscan, that searches a genomic sequence with a sliding window searching simultaneously for matches to a set of invariant bases and conserved self-complementary regions in tRNAs with an accuracy of 97.5%.

(a) True

(b) False

I had been asked this question during an online exam.

This interesting question is from Searching Genomes for RNA & RNA Structure Modeling Applications topic in section RNA Structure Prediction of Bioinformatics

Answer 1

Correct answer is (a) True

To elaborate: A method for finding the RNA polymerase III transcriptional control regions of tRNA genes using a scoring matrix derived from known control regions, was derived. That is also very accurate. Finally, Lowe and Eddy (1997) have devised a search algorithm tRNAscan-SE that uses a combination of three methods to find tRNA genes in genomic sequences—tRNAscan, the Pavesi algorithm, and the COVELS program based on sequence covariance analysis (Eddy and Durbin 1994). This method is reportedly 99–100% accurate with an extremely low rate of false positives.