Analysis of Thermodynamic Models and Performance in RnaPredict - An Evolutionary Algorithm for RNA Folding

Two extensive analyzes on RnaPredict, an evolutionary algorithm for RNA folding, are presented here. The first study evaluates the performance of individual nearest neighbor (INN) and individual nearest neighbor-hydrogen bond (INN-HB), two stacking-energy thermodynamic models; the criteria for comparison is the correlation between the prediction accuracy and the free energy of predicted structures for 9 RNA sequences. Despite some variance, a trend between lower free energies and increases in true positive base pairs is apparent. In general, this correlation decreases as the sequence length increases. The second study compares the performance of RnaPredict against the mfold dynamic programming algorithm (DPA) on the same sequences in terms of specificity and sensitivity. The results indicate that RnaPredict has comparable performance to mfold on sub-optimal structures, and outperforms mfold´s minimum free energy structures