background: rna plays key role in many aspects of biological processes and its tertiary structure is critical for its biological function. rna secondary structure represents various significant portions of rna tertiary structure. since the biological function of rna is concluded indirectly from its primary structure, it would be important to analyze the relations between the rna sequences and t...

Background: RNA plays key role in many aspects of biological processes and its tertiary structure is critical for its biological function. RNA secondary structure represents various significant portions of RNA tertiary structure. Since the biological function of RNA is concluded indirectly from its primary structure, it would be important to analyze the relations between the RNA sequences and t...

Visualizing the navigation of an ensemble of unfolded molecules through the bumpy energy landscape in search of the native state gives a pictorial view of biomolecular folding. This picture, when combined with concepts in polymer theory, provides a unified theory of RNA and protein folding. Just as for proteins, the major folding free energy barrier for RNA scales sublinearly with the number of...

1. Background RNA secondary structure Pseudoknots Non-coding RNA 2. CONTRAfold: Probabilistic RNA folding Overview of the algorithm Details of the algorithm Performance of CONTRAfold 3. Other RNA folding methods: Physics-based models and Stochastic Context Free Grammars Physics-based models Stochastic Context Free Grammars Advantages of CONTRAfold over these other approaches 4. How RNA folding ...

RNA co-transcriptional folding has long been suspected to play an active role in helping proper native folding of ribozymes and structured regulatory motifs in mRNA untranslated regions (UTRs). Yet, the underlying mechanisms and coding requirements for efficient co-transcriptional folding remain unclear. Traditional approaches have intrinsic limitations to dissect RNA folding paths, as they rel...

Starting from the assumption that the protein and RNA folding is an event of quantum transition between molecular conformations,we deduced a folding rate formula and studied the chain length (torsion number) dependence and temperature dependence of the folding rate. The chain length dependence of the folding rate was tested in 65 two-state proteins and 27 RNA molecules. The success of the compa...

Recent studies in protein folding suggest that native state topology plays a dominant role in determining the folding mechanism, yet an analogous statement has not been made for RNA, most likely due to the strong coupling between the ionic environment and conformational energetics that make RNA folding more complex than protein folding. Applying a distributed computing architecture to sample ne...