Most functional RNA molecules have characteristic secondary structures that are highly conserved in evolution. Here we present a method for computing the consensus structure of a set aligned RNA sequences taking into account both thermodynamic stability and sequence covariation. Comparison with...

We show that the problem of designing RNA sequences that can fold into multiple stable secondary structures can be transformed into a combinatorial optimization problem that can be solved by means of simple heuristics. Hence it is feasible to design RNA switches with prescribed strucutral...

Almost all RNA molecules - and consequently also almost all subsequences of a large RNA molecule - form secondary structures. The presence of secondary structure in itself therefore does not indicate any functional significance. In fact, we may not expect a conserved secondary structure for all...

We present an implementation of McCaskill's algorithm for computing the base pair probabilities of an RNA molecule for massively parallel message passing architectures. The program can be used to routinely fold RNA sequences of more than 10000 nucleotides. Applications to complete viral genomes...