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. 2013 Nov 11;5(1):111–130. doi: 10.1002/wrna.1201

Table 2.

Motif Finding Methods

Software/Method Input Summary Availability References
AMADEUS DNA or RNA sequences A method for finding short sequence motifs overrepresented in the promoters or 3′UTRs of a given set of genes Software package: http://acgt.cs.tau.ac.il/amadeus/download.html 52
Aptamotif RNA sequences identified by SELEX A method for finding sequence-structure motifs in SELEX-derived aptamers. RNA secondary structure is predicted with ensemble-based methods. Software package: available upon request 57
CMfinder RNA sequences Extension of CM models to search for RNA motifs in a set of unaligned sequences with long flanking regions Software package and web server: http://bio.cs.washington.edu/yzizhen/CMfinder/ 58
cERMIT DNA or RNA sequences and associated expression or affinity measures A rank-ordered-based method that searches for sequence motifs bested supported by the observed experimental evidence (i.e., semiquantitative genome-wide binding data). It uses the complete dataset and does not require a cutoff to define the positive set. Software package: http://www.genome.duke.edu/labs/ohler/research/transcription/cERMIT/ 47
COVE RNA sequences and alignment (optional) Implementation of CMs for (1) secondary structure-based multiple sequence alignment; (2) consensus secondary structure prediction; and (iii) secondary structure-based database scanning. Software package: ftp://selab.janelia.org/pub/software/cove/ 59
FIRE DNA or RNA sequences A method to detect DNA or RNA motifs that model the mutual information between sequences and gene expression measurements. Software package: http://tavazoielab.princeton.edu/FIRE/
Web server: https://iget.princeton.edu/
50
MatrixREDUCE DNA or RNA sequences and associated expression or affinity measures A biophysical model to discover sequence-specific binding affinity of the factor of interest (TF or RBP). Software package: http://bussemaker.bio.columbia.edu/software/MatrixREDUCE/ 48
MEME DNA or RNA sequences A generative model for finding motifs in DNA or protein sequences. Can be used for finding sequence motifs in RNA sequences. Software package and web server: http://meme.sdsc.edu/meme4_6_0/cgibin/meme.cgi 49
MEMERIS RNA sequences and predicted structures Extension of MEME for finding RNA motifs. It uses RNA structure information as a prior to guide the motif search toward single-stranded regions. Software package (includes scripts for structure prediction): http://www.bioinf.uni-freiburg.de/∼hiller/MEMERIS/ 60
REFINE DNA or RNA sequences Extension of MEME, filters out regions of target sequences that are relatively devoid of discriminatory hexamers, and then applies MEME motif-finding algorithm. Software package: http://nar.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2010/10/18/nar.gkq920/suppl/DC1 51
RNAalifold RNA alignment A method for detecting conserved RNA secondary structures in a family of related RNA sequences. Software package: http://www.tbi.univie.ac.at/∼ivo/RNA/
Web server: http://rna.tbi.univie.ac.at/cgibin/RNAalifold.cgi
61
RNAcontext RNA sequences, associated affinity measures and predicted structures A discriminatory approach for finding RNA motifs that represent the sequence and structure preferences of RBPs. RNAcontext can model a wide range of structure features using a flexible alphabet. Software package (includes scripts for structure prediction): http://morrislab.med.utoronto.ca/software.html 53
RNApromo RNA sequences CM-based model for finding RNA motifs. Software package and web server: http://genie.weizmann.ac.il/pubs/rnamotifs08/rnamotifs08_predict.html 62