detection of transfer RNA genes in genomic sequence

 tRNAscan-SE identifies 99-100% of transfer RNA genes in DNA sequence while
 giving less than one false positive per 15 gigabases. Two previously described
 tRNA detection programs are used as fast, first-pass prefilters to identify
 candidate tRNAs, which are then analyzed by a highly selective tRNA covariance
 model. This work represents a practical application of RNA covariance models,
 which are general, probabilistic secondary structure profiles based on
 stochastic context-free grammars. tRNAscan-SE searches at ~ 30 000 bp/s.
 Additional extensions to tRNAscan-SE detect unusual tRNA homologues such as
 selenocysteine tRNAs, tRNA-derived repetitive elements and tRNA pseudogenes.