RNAxplorer: harnessing the power of guiding potentials to sample RNA landscapes

Predicting the folding dynamics of RNAs is a computationally difficult problem, first and foremost due to the combinatorial explosion of alternative structures in the folding space. Abstractions are therefore needed to simplify downstream analyses, and thus make them computationally tractable. This can be achieved by various structure sampling algorithms. However, current sampling methods are still time consuming and frequently fail to represent key elements of the folding space.

We introduce RNAxplorer, a novel adaptive sampling method to efficiently explore the structure space of RNAs. RNAxplorer uses dynamic programming to perform an efficient Boltzmann sampling in the presence of guiding potentials, which are accumulated into pseudo-energy terms and reflect similarity to already well-sampled structures. This way, we effectively steer sampling toward underrepresented or unexplored regions of the structure space.

We developed and applied different measures to benchmark our sampling methods against its competitors. Most of the measures show that RNAxplorer produces more diverse structure samples, yields rare conformations that may be inaccessible to other sampling methods and is better at finding the most relevant kinetic traps in the landscape. Thus, it produces a more representative coarse graining of the landscape, which is well suited to subsequently compute better approximations of RNA folding kinetics.

https://github.com/ViennaRNA/RNAxplorer/.

Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.