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COFOLD: an RNA secondary structure prediction method that takes co-transcriptional folding into account.

ABSTRACT: Existing state-of-the-art methods that take a single RNA sequence and predict the corresponding RNA secondary structure are thermodynamic methods. These aim to predict the most stable RNA structure. There exists by now ample experimental and theoretical evidence that the process of structure formation matters and that sequences in vivo fold while they are being transcribed. None of the thermodynamic methods, however, consider the process of structure formation. Here, we present a conceptually new method for predicting RNA secondary structure, called CoFold, that takes effects of co-transcriptional folding explicitly into account. Our method significantly improves the state-of-art in terms of prediction accuracy, especially for long sequences of >1000 nt in length.

SUBMITTER: Proctor JR

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3643587 | biostudies-literature | 2013 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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COFOLD: an RNA secondary structure prediction method that takes co-transcriptional folding into account.

Proctor Jeff R JR Meyer Irmtraud M IM

Nucleic acids research 20130319 9

Existing state-of-the-art methods that take a single RNA sequence and predict the corresponding RNA secondary structure are thermodynamic methods. These aim to predict the most stable RNA structure. There exists by now ample experimental and theoretical evidence that the process of structure formation matters and that sequences in vivo fold while they are being transcribed. None of the thermodynamic methods, however, consider the process of structure formation. Here, we present a conceptually ne ...[more]

PMID: 23511969

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Project description:BackgroundMany bioinformatics tools for RNA secondary structure analysis are based on a thermodynamic model of RNA folding. They predict a single, "optimal" structure by free energy minimization, they enumerate near-optimal structures, they compute base pair probabilities and dot plots, representative structures of different abstract shapes, or Boltzmann probabilities of structures and shapes. Although all programs refer to the same physical model, they implement it with considerable variation for different tasks, and little is known about the effects of heuristic assumptions and model simplifications used by the programs on the outcome of the analysis.ResultsWe extract four different models of the thermodynamic folding space which underlie the programs RNAFOLD, RNASHAPES, and RNASUBOPT. Their differences lie within the details of the energy model and the granularity of the folding space. We implement probabilistic shape analysis for all models, and introduce the shape probability shift as a robust measure of model similarity. Using four data sets derived from experimentally solved structures, we provide a quantitative evaluation of the model differences.ConclusionsWe find that search space granularity affects the computed shape probabilities less than the over- or underapproximation of free energy by a simplified energy model. Still, the approximations perform similar enough to implementations of the full model to justify their continued use in settings where computational constraints call for simpler algorithms. On the side, we observe that the rarely used level 2 shapes, which predict the complete arrangement of helices, multiloops, internal loops and bulges, include the "true" shape in a rather small number of predicted high probability shapes. This calls for an investigation of new strategies to extract high probability members from the (very large) level 2 shape space of an RNA sequence. We provide implementations of all four models, written in a declarative style that makes them easy to be modified. Based on our study, future work on thermodynamic RNA folding may make a choice of model based on our empirical data. It can take our implementations as a starting point for further program development.

Dataset Information

COFOLD: an RNA secondary structure prediction method that takes co-transcriptional folding into account.

Publications

COFOLD: an RNA secondary structure prediction method that takes co-transcriptional folding into account.

Similar Datasets

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