abstract = "The computational identification of conserved motifs
in RNA molecules is a major (yet largely unsolved)
problem. Structural conservation serves as strong
evidence for important RNA functionality. Thus,
comparative structure analysis is the gold standard for
the discovery and interpretation of functional RNAs.In
this paper we focus on one of the functional RNA motif
types, sequence-structure motifs in RNA molecules,
which marks the molecule as targets to be recognized by
other molecules.We present a new approach for the
detection of RNA structure (including pseudoknots),
which is conserved among a set of unaligned RNA
sequences. Our method extends previous approaches for
this problem, which were based on first identifying
conserved stems and then assembling them into complex
structural motifs. The novelty of our approach is in
simultaneously preforming both the identification and
the assembly of these stems. We believe this novel
unified approach offers a more informative model for
deciphering the evolution of functional RNAs, where the
sets of stems comprising a conserved motif co-evolve as
a correlated functional unit.Since the task of mining
RNA sequence-structure motifs can be addressed by
solving the maximum weighted clique problem in an
n-partite graph, we translate the maximum weighted
clique problem into a state graph. Then, we gather and
define domain knowledge and low-level heuristics for
this domain. Finally, we learn hyper-heuristics for
this domain, which can be used with heuristic search
algorithms (e.g., A-star, IDA*) for the mining task.The
hyper-heuristics are evolved using HH-Evolver, a tool
for domain-specific, hyper-heuristic evolution. Our
approach is designed to overcome the computational
limitations of current algorithms, and to remove the
necessity of previous assumptions that were used for
sparsifying the graph.This is still work in progress
and as yet we have no results to report. However, given
the interest in the methodology and its previous
success in other domains we are hopeful that these
shall be forthcoming soon.",