R3DMCS: a web server for visualizing structural variation in RNA motifs across experimental 3D structures from the same organism or across species.

Abstract

Motivation: The recent progress in RNA structure determination methods has resulted in a surge of newly solved RNA 3D structures. However, there is an absence of a user-friendly browser-based tool that can facilitate the comparison and visualization of RNA motifs across multiple 3D structures.

Results: We introduce R3DMCS, a web server that allows users to compare selected RNA nucleotides across all 3D structures of a given molecule from a given species, or across all 3D structures mapped to a single Rfam family. Starting from one instance of the motif, R3DMCS retrieves, aligns, annotates, organizes, and displays 3D coordinates of corresponding sets of nucleotides from other 3D structures. With R3DMCS, one can explore conformational changes of motifs due to 3D structures being solved in different functional states or different experimental conditions. One can also investigate conservation of 3D structure across species, or changes in 3D structure due to changes in sequence.

Availability and implementation: R3DMCS is open-source software and freely available at https://rna.bgsu.edu/correspondence/ and https://github.com/BGSU-RNA/RNA-3D-correspondence.