Identification of ribosomal RNA genes in metagenomic fragments

Motivation: Identification of genes coding for ribosomal RNA (rRNA) is considered an important goal in the analysis of data from metagenomics projects. Here, we report the development of a software program designed for the identification of rRNA genes from metagenomic fragments based on hidden Markov models (HMMs). This program provides rRNA gene predictions with high sensitivity and specificity on artificially fragmented genomic DNAs. Availability: Supplementary files, scripts and sample data are available at http://tools.camera.calit2.net/camera/meta_rna.