Structure based approach for understanding organism specific recognition of protein-RNA complexes

Background Protein-RNA interactions perform diverse functions within the cell. Understanding the recognition mechanism of protein-RNA complexes has been a challenging task in molecular and computational biology. In earlier works, the recognition mechanisms have been studied for a specific complex or using a set of non–redundant complexes. In this work, we have constructed 18 sets of same protein-RNA complexes belonging to different organisms from Protein Data Bank (PDB). The similarities and differences in each set of complexes have been revealed in terms of various sequence and structure based features such as root mean square deviation, sequence homology, propensity of binding site residues, variance, conservation at binding sites, binding segments, binding motifs of amino acid residues and nucleotides, preferred amino acid-nucleotide pairs and influence of neighboring residues for binding.