ARWEN:: a program to detect tRNA genes in metazoan mitochondrial nucleotide sequences

Motivation: Mitochondrial genomes encode their own transfer RNAs (tRNAs). These are often degenerate in sequence and structure compared to tRNAs in their bacterial ancestors. This is one of the reasons why current tRNA gene predictor programs perform poorly identifying mitochondrial tRNA genes. As a consequence there is a need for a new program with the specific aim of predicting these tRNAs. Results: In this study, we present the software ARWEN that identifies tRNA genes in metazoan mitochondrial nucleotide sequences. ARWEN detects close to 100 of previously annotated genes.