IRBIS is a computational pipeline for detecting conserved complementary regions in unaligned orthologous sequences. Unlike other methods, it follows the "first-fold-then-align" principle in which all possible combinations of complementary k-mers are searched for simultaneous conservation. The novel trimming procedure reduces the size of the search space and improves the performance to the point where large-scale analyses of intra- and intermolecular RNA-RNA interactions become possible. In this article, I provide a rigorous description of the method, benchmarking on simulated and real data, and a set of stringent predictions of intramolecular RNA structure in placental mammals, drosophilids, and nematodes. I discuss two particular cases of long-range RNA structures that are likely to have a causal effect on single- and multiple-exon skipping, one in the mammalian gene Dystonin and the other in the insect gene Ca-α1D. In Dystonin, one of the two complementary boxes contains a binding site of Rbfox protein similar to one recently described in Enah gene. I also report that snoRNAs and long noncoding RNAs (lncRNAs) have a high capacity of base-pairing to introns of protein-coding genes, suggesting possible involvement of these transcripts in splicing regulation. I also find that conserved sequences that occur equally likely on both strands of DNA (e.g., transcription factor binding sites) contribute strongly to the false-discovery rate and, therefore, would confound every such analysis. IRBIS is an open-source software that is available at http://genome.crg.es/~dmitri/irbis/.

EXPLOR_STEP=$WICRI_ROOT/Sante/explor/MersV1/Data/Main/Exploration

HfdSelect -h $EXPLOR_STEP/biblio.hfd -nk 001C30 | SxmlIndent | more

HfdSelect -h $EXPLOR_AREA/Data/Main/Exploration/biblio.hfd -nk 001C30 | SxmlIndent | more

{{Explor lien
   |wiki=    Sante
   |area=    MersV1
   |flux=    Main
   |étape=   Exploration
   |type=    RBID
   |clé=     pubmed:25142064
   |texte=   IRBIS: a systematic search for conserved complementarity.
}}

HfdIndexSelect -h $EXPLOR_AREA/Data/Main/Exploration/RBID.i   -Sk "pubmed:25142064" \
       | HfdSelect -Kh $EXPLOR_AREA/Data/Main/Exploration/biblio.hfd   \
       | NlmPubMed2Wicri -a MersV1