MoiRNAiFold: a novel tool for complex in silico RNA design Articles uri icon

authors

  • MINUESA, GERARD
  • ALSINA, CRISTINA
  • GARCIA MARTIN, JUAN ANTONIO
  • OLIVEROS, JUAN CARLOS
  • DOTU RODRIGUEZ, IVAN JAVIER

publication date

  • May 2021

start page

  • 4934

end page

  • 4943

issue

  • 9

volume

  • 49

International Standard Serial Number (ISSN)

  • 0305-1048

Electronic International Standard Serial Number (EISSN)

  • 1362-4962

abstract

  • Novel tools for in silico design of RNA constructs such as riboregulators are required in order to reduce time and cost to production for the development of diagnostic and therapeutic advances. Here, we present MoiRNAiFold, a versatile and user-friendly tool for de novo synthetic RNA design. MoiRNAiFold is based on Constraint Programming and it includes novel variable types, heuristics and restart strategies for Large Neighborhood Search. Moreover, this software can handle dozens of design constraints and quality measures and improves features for RNA regulation control of gene expression, such as Translation Efficiency calculation. We demonstrate that MoiRNAiFold outperforms any previous software in benchmarking structural RNA puzzles from EteRNA. Importantly, with regard to biologically relevant RNA designs, we focus on RNA riboregulators, demonstrating that the designed RNA sequences are functional both in vitro and in vivo. Overall, we have generated a powerful tool for de novo complex RNA design that we make freely available as a web server (https://moiraibiodesign.com/design/).

subjects

  • Biology and Biomedicine
  • Computer Science
  • Mathematics

keywords

  • nucleic acid structure; rna characterisation and manipulation; computational methods