Section: Software

VARNA

Participants : Yann Ponty [ correspondant ] , Alain Denise.

Varna [5] is a new tool for the automated drawing, visualization and annotation of the secondary structure of RNA, designed as a companion software for web servers and databases. Varna implements four drawing algorithms, supports input/output using the classic formats dbn, ct, bpseq and RNAML and exports the drawing as five picture formats, either pixel-based (JPEG, PNG ) or vector-based (SVG, EPS and XFIG ). It also allows manual modification and structural annotation of the resulting drawing using either an interactive point and click approach, within a web server or through command-line arguments.

In November 2009, Varna is currently used by RNA scientists and websites such as the NestedAlign web server (http://nestedalign.lri.fr/ ), the IRESite database (http://iresite.org/ ), and the TFold webserver (http://tfold.ibisc.univ-evry.fr/TFold/ ). It is a free software, released under the terms of the GPLv3.0 license and available at http://varna.lri.fr .