Section: New Results

Structured RNAs

In many families of strutured RNAs, the signature of the family cannot be characterized by a single consensus structure, and is mainly described by a set of alternate secondary structures. For example, certain classes of RNAs adopt at least two distinct stable folding states to carry out their function. This is the case of riboswitches, that undergo structural changes upon binding with other molecules, and recently some other RNA regulators were proven to show evolutionary evidence for alternative structure. The necessity to take into account multiple structures also arises when modeling an RNA family with some structural variation across species, or when it comes to work with a set of predicted suboptimal foldings. In this perspective, we have introduced the concept of RNA multistructures, that is a formal grammar based framework specifically designed to model a set of alternate RNA secondary structures. Continuing our work of 2014, we provide several motivating examples and propose an efficient algorithm to search for RNA multistructures within a genomic sequence. This work was published in [7] .