ElTetrado: a tool for identification and classification of tetrads and quadruplexes

Abstract

Background

Quadruplexes are specific structure motifs occurring, e.g., in telomeres and transcriptional regulatory regions. Recent discoveries confirmed their importance in biomedicine and led to an intensified examination of their properties. So far, the study of these motifs has focused mainly on the sequence and the tertiary structure, and concerned canonical structures only. Whereas, more and more non-canonical quadruplex motifs are being discovered.

Results

Here, we present ElTetrado, a software that identifies quadruplexes (composed of guanine- and other nucleobase-containing tetrads) in nucleic acid structures and classifies them according to the recently introduced ONZ taxonomy. The categorization is based on the secondary structure topology of quadruplexes and their component tetrads. It supports the analysis of canonical and non-canonical motifs. Besides the class recognition, ElTetrado prepares a dot-bracket and graphical representations of the secondary structure, which reflect the specificity of the quadruplex’s structure topology. It is implemented as a freely available, standalone application, available at https://github.com/tzok/eltetrado.

Conclusions

The proposed software tool allows to identify and classify tetrads and quadruplexes based on the topology of their secondary structures. It complements existing approaches focusing on the sequence and 3D structure.