RNA Bioinformatics

I am going to San Diego tonight for the Recomb workshop on systems biology and regulatory genomics. Featuring
an excellent list of talks.

A mini-review. Coming out soon. I am still trying to figure out if it's ok to put a preprint online here, considering that it might take another 1-2 months for the journal to publish it online. Anyway, below is the abstract:

Recently, an interesting question has emerged in the evolutionary interpretation of sequence substitution data as evidence of amino acid selection pressure. Specifically, the Ka/Ks metric was designed to measure selection pressure on amino acid substitutions, assuming that the synonymous substitution rate Ks reflects the neutral nucleotide substitution rate. However, there is increasing evidence for selection pressure at silent sites due to constraints of RNA splicing. Is Ka/Ks an appropriate metric for selection pressure on amino acid substitutions, in the presence of other selection pressures acting only at the RNA level (such as selection for exonic splicing enhancers)? Or can the resulting decreases in Ks from such selection pressures introduce bias into the Ka/Ks metric, so that it no longer gives an accurate measure of amino acid level selection pressure? In this review we present both mathematical models and empirical evidence for these divergent points of view.

Here is the reason why this is an important question:

Off-topic here, but this story is really striking and has a profound impact.