A contact-waiting-time metric and RNA folding rates

TL;DR

This paper introduces a simple contact-waiting-time metric that correlates strongly with RNA folding rates, providing a potential tool for predicting RNA structural dynamics.

Contribution

The authors propose a new RNA structural complexity metric based on contact energetics, demonstrating its strong correlation with experimentally determined folding rates.

Findings

The metric correlates with folding rates (correlation coefficient: -0.95).

It accurately predicts folding rates of various RNA sequences.

Potential applications include predicting folding rates of structural RNAs.

Abstract

Metrics for indirectly predicting the folding rates of RNA sequences are of interest. In this letter, we introduce a simple metric of RNA structural complexity, which accounts for differences in the energetic contributions of RNA base contacts toward RNA structure formation. We apply the metric to RNA sequences whose folding rates were previously determined experimentally. We find that the metric has good correlation (correlation coefficient: -0.95, p << 0.01) with the logarithmically transformed folding rates of those RNA sequences. This suggests that the metric can be useful for predicting RNA folding rates. We use the metric to predict the folding rates of bacterial and eukaryotic group II introns. Future applications of the metric (e.g., to predict structural RNAs) could prove fruitful.