Comparative Study of Single-stranded Oligonucleotides Secondary Structure Prediction Tools.
Journal:
BMC bioinformatics
PMID:
37940855
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Single-stranded nucleic acids (ssNAs) have important biological roles and a high biotechnological potential linked to their ability to bind to numerous molecular targets. This depends on the different spatial conformations they can assume. The first level of ssNAs spatial organisation corresponds to their base pairs pattern, i.e. their secondary structure. Many computational tools have been developed to predict the ssNAs secondary structures, making the choice of the appropriate tool difficult, and an up-to-date guide on the limits and applicability of current secondary structure prediction tools is missing. Therefore, we performed a comparative study of the performances of 9 freely available tools (mfold, RNAfold, CentroidFold, CONTRAfold, MC-Fold, LinearFold, UFold, SPOT-RNA, and MXfold2) on a dataset of 538 ssNAs with known experimental secondary structure.