Abstract
RNA molecule plays important and fundamental roles in many biological processes. In the most times, activities of RNAs are determined by their structures. In notice to complexity and costly of laboratory methods to predict RNAs structure, computational approaches are used. There are variety of algorithms to predict RNA secondary structure. In this paper, a genetic algorithm called RNAG is presented to predict the RNA secondary structure based on minimum free energy (MFE). In this algorithm, each individual of population includes some stems. The individuals are increasingly ranked based on fitness value of MFE from stems and loops, and in the follow, crossover and mutation operations are done on individuals to make a new population, respectively. Process of population generation continues until an individual with proper MFE is produced. Finally, this individual is selected as an optimal RNA secondary structure. The proposed algorithm is performed on some RNAs in the bacteria. Results of the paper show that RNAG algorithm has a high accuracy in comparison with the other related methods.
Fatemeh Zare-Mirakabad
Associate Professor
My research interests include bioinformatics, computational biology and artificial intelligence.