title: Evolutionary solution for the RNA design problem.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  RNAs play fundamental roles in cellular processes. The function of an RNA is highly dependent on its 3D conformation, which is referred to as the RNA tertiary structure. Because the prediction or experimental determination of these structures is difficult, so many works focus on the problems associated with the RNA secondary structure. Here, we consider the RNA inverse folding problem, in which an RNA secondary structure is given as a target structure and the goal is to design an RNA sequence that folds into the target structure. In this article, we introduce a new evolutionary algorithm for the RNA inverse folding problem. Our algorithm, entitled Evolutionary RNA Design, generates a sequence whose minimum free energy structure is the same as the target structure.
  
  
  RESULTS
  We compare our algorithm with INFO-RNA, MODENA, RNAiFold and NUPACK approaches for some biological test sets. The results presented in this article indicate that for longer structures, our algorithm performs better than the other mentioned algorithms in terms of the energy range, accuracy, speedup and nucleotide distribution. Particularly, the generated RNA sequences in our method are much more reliable and similar to the natural RNA sequences.
authors.affiliation: Department of Computer Science, School of Mathematics, Statistics, and Computer Science, University of Tehran, P. O. Box: 14155-6455, Tehran, Iran, Laboratoire d'Informatique (LIX), Ecole Polytechnique, 91128 Palaiseau CEDEX, France and School of Biological Science, Institute for Research in Fundamental Sciences (IPM), P.O. Box: 19395-5746 Tehran, Iran.
authors.forename: Ali
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Esmaili-Taheri
authors.forename: Mohammad
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Ganjtabesh
authors.forename: Morteza
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Mohammad-Noori
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D009690:Nucleic Acid Conformation; D012313:RNA / Q000737:chemistry*; D059370:RNA Folding; D017423:Sequence Analysis, RNA / Q000379:methods*; D012984:Software
chemical_list: D012313:RNA