RibEx: a web server for locating riboswitches and other conserved bacterial regulatory elements

Abstract

We present RibEx (riboswitch explorer), a web server capable of searching any sequence for known riboswitches as well as other predicted, but highly conserved, bacterial regulatory elements. It allows the visual inspection of the identified motifs in relation to attenuators and open reading frames (ORFs). Any of the ORF's or regulatory elements' sequence can be obtained with a click and submitted to NCBI's BLAST. Alternatively, the genome context of all other genes regulated by the same element can be explored with our genome context tool (GeConT). RibEx is available at http://www.ibt.unam.mx/biocomputo/ribex.html.