Question

______ molecules can simply be identified based on their sequence similarity with already-known sequences.

(a) Larger, less conserved

(b) Larger, highly conserved

(c) smaller, highly conserved

(d) shorter, highly conserved

This question was addressed to me in an interview for job.

The origin of the question is Searching Genomes for RNA & RNA Structure Modeling Applications topic in section RNA Structure Prediction of Bioinformatics

Answer 1

Correct option is (b) Larger, highly conserved

The best explanation: For smaller sequences with more sequence variation, this method does not work. A number of methods for finding small RNA genes have been described and are available on the Web. A major problem with these methods in searches of large genomes is that a small false positive rate becomes quite unacceptable because there are so many false positives to check out.