Mining RNA Tertiary Motifs with Structure Graphs

We present a novel application of graph database mining to identify tertiary motifs in RNA structures. In our method, we abstract an RNA molecule as a labeled graph and use a frequent subgraph mining technique to derive tertiary motifs. By applying our technique to ribosome RNA and transfer RNA, we have identified known RNA tertiary motifs such as the ribose zipper and U-turn, plus candidates for novel tertiary motifs. Finally, we suggest an iterative multiple structure alignment algorithm to classify tertiary motifs and generate consensus motifs.