14 - Estructura, plegamiento y evolución de RNA

Chapter 14 of the book "Bioinformática con Ñ" a project aiming to provide specialized educational bibliography on Bioinformatics for Spanish speakers. The result consists on more than 500 pages where the following matters are covered: biomedical databases, sequence analysis, phylogeny and evolution, structural biology, including diverse topics such as docking, virtual screening or molecular dynamics, statistics and R, systems biology, programming skills, data mining, parallel computation, bibliography management and science article writing

"Bioinformática con Ñ v1.0": a collaborative project of young Spanish scientists to write a complete book about Bioinformatics

Here we present a project aiming to provide specialized educational bibliography on Bioinformatics for Spanish speakers. The idea of writing a book in Spanish language covering the most important topics in the field of Bioinformatics was born in the XIth Spanish Symposium on Bioinformatics in Barcelona two years ago. Different scientists have been involved in the project, from senior scientists to PhD students from different countries. The book intends to be the beginning of an open project, where all the chapters are susceptible of being updated and new topics can be incorporated in future versions. Current book version can be accessed online at http://goo.gl/UYG0o7.Peer Reviewe

Designing synthetic RNAs to determine the relevance of structural motifs in picornavirus IRES elements

The function of Internal Ribosome Entry Site (IRES) elements is intimately linked to their RNA structure. Viral IRES elements are organized in modular domains consisting of one or more stem-loops that harbor conserved RNA motifs critical for internal initiation of translation. A conserved motif is the pyrimidine-tract located upstream of the functional initiation codon in type I and II picornavirus IRES. By computationally designing synthetic RNAs to fold into a structure that sequesters the polypyrimidine tract in a hairpin, we establish a correlation between predicted inaccessibility of the pyrimidine tract and IRES activity, as determined in both in vitro and in vivo systems. Our data supports the hypothesis that structural sequestration of the pyrimidine-tract within a stable hairpin inactivates IRES activity, since the stronger the stability of the hairpin the higher the inhibition of protein synthesis. Destabilization of the stem-loop immediately upstream of the pyrimidine-tract also decreases IRES activity. Our work introduces a hybrid computational/experimental method to determine the importance of structural motifs for biological function. Specifically, we show the feasibility of using the software RNAiFold to design synthetic RNAs with particular sequence and structural motifs that permit subsequent experimental determination of the importance of such motifs for biological function.Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (MINECO) [CSD2009-00080, BFU2011-25437, BFU2014-54564] and by an Institutional Grant from Fundacion Ramon ArecesPeer Reviewe

MoiRNAiFold: a novel tool for complex in silico RNA design

© The Author(s) 2021.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/Gerard Minuesa leading to these results has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme under the Marie SklodowskaCurie grant agreement No 712949 (TECNIOspring PLUS) and from the Agency for Business and Competitiveness (ACCIO) of the Government of Catalonia. Fund- ´ ing for open access charge: European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No 712949 (TECNIOspring PLUS) and from the Agency for Business and Competitiveness (ACCIO) of the Government of Catalonia