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Updated: May 13, 2025

RNA Secondary Structure Prediction Using High-throughput SHAPE
Published on: May 31, 2013
JAX-RNAfold: scalable differentiable folding
1School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, United States.
Summary:
Differentiable folding is an emerging paradigm for RNA design in which a probabilistic sequence representation is optimized via gradient descent. However, given the significant memory overhead of differentiating the expected partition function over all RNA sequences, the existing proof-of-concept algorithm only scales to ≤50 nucleotides. We present JAX-RNAfold, an open-source software package for our drastically improved differentiable folding algorithm that scales to 1,250 nucleotides on a single GPU. Our software permits the natural inclusion of differentiable folding as a module in larger deep learning pipelines, as well as complex RNA design procedures such as mRNA design with flexible objective functions.
Availability And Implementation:
JAX-RNAfold is hosted on GitHub (https://github.com/rkruegs123/jax-rnafold) and can be installed locally as a Python package. All source code is also archived on Zenodo (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15003072).
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