RNAcanvas: interactive drawing and exploration of nucleic acid structures

Area of Science:

• Bioinformatics
• Structural Biology
• Computational Biology

Background:

• Accurate visualization of nucleic acid structures, especially RNA, is crucial for research communication.
• Manual drawing of large RNA structures (thousands of nucleotides) is time-consuming and impractical.

Purpose of the Study:

• To introduce RNAcanvas, a software tool for automated and interactive 2D RNA structure drawing.
• To enhance the efficiency and accuracy of RNA structure visualization and analysis.

Main Methods:

• Automated arrangement of residues into stems and loops.
• Interactive editing with click-and-drag functionality.
• Support for Leontis-Westhof notation and custom labels.

Main Results:

• RNAcanvas enables customizable drawing of RNA elements, including non-canonical base pairs and tertiary interactions.
• Features for large structures include real-time highlighting, motif search, and phylogenetic comparison.
• Export options in SVG and PowerPoint formats facilitate publication-ready figures.

Conclusions:

• RNAcanvas provides a powerful and efficient solution for visualizing and analyzing complex RNA structures.
• The software assists researchers in refining structural predictions and identifying long-range interactions.