SimulFold: Simultaneously Inferring RNA Structures Including Pseudoknots, Alignments, and Trees Using a Bayesian MCMC Framework
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Computational methods for predicting evolutionarily conserved rather than thermodynamic RNA structures have recently attracted increased interest. These methods are indispensable not only for elucidating the regulatory roles of known RNA transcripts, but also for predicting RNA genes. It has been notoriously difficult to devise them to make the best use of the available data and to predict high-quality RNA structures that may also contain pseudoknots. We introduce a novel theoretical framework for co-estimating an RNA secondary structure including pseudoknots, a multiple sequence alignment, and an evolutionary tree, given several RNA input sequences. We also present an implementation of the framework in a new computer program, called SimulFold, which employs a Bayesian Markov chain Monte Carlo method to sample from the joint posterior distribution of RNA structures, alignments, and trees. We use the new framework to predict RNA structures, and comprehensively evaluate the quality of our predictions by comparing our results to those of several other programs. We also present preliminary data that show SimulFold's potential as an alignment and phylogeny prediction method. SimulFold overcomes many conceptual limitations that current RNA structure prediction methods face, introduces several new theoretical techniques, and generates high-quality predictions of conserved RNA structures that may include pseudoknots. It is thus likely to have a strong impact, both on the field of RNA structure prediction and on a wide range of data analyses.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".