Cited by 215RNA and protein synthesis mechanismsGenomics and Phylogenetic StudiesAlgorithms and Data Compression

LinearFold: linear-time approximate RNA folding by 5'-to-3' dynamic programming and beam search

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Huang, Liang, Zhang, He, Deng, Dezhong, Zhao, Kai, Liu, Kaibo, Hendrix, David A, Mathews, David H·2019·Bioinformatics

Abstract

Motivation: Predicting the secondary structure of an ribonucleic acid (RNA) sequence is useful in many applications. Existing algorithms [based on dynamic programming] suffer from a major limitation: their runtimes scale cubically with the RNA length, and this slowness limits their use in genome-wide applications. Results: We present a novel alternative O(n3)-time dynamic programming algorithm for RNA folding that is amenable to heuristics that make it run in O(n) time and O(n) space, while producing a high-quality approximation to the optimal solution. Inspired by incremental parsing for context-free grammars in computational linguistics, our alternative dynamic programming algorithm scans the sequence in a left-to-right (5′-to-3′) direction rather than in a bottom-up fashion, which allows us to employ the effective beam pruning heuristic. Our work, though inexact, is the first RNA folding algorithm to achieve linear runtime (and linear space) without imposing constraints on the output structure. Surprisingly, our approximate search results in even higher overall accuracy on a diverse database of sequences with known structures. More interestingly, it leads to significantly more accurate predictions on the longest sequence families in that database (16S and 23S Ribosomal RNAs), as well as improved accuracies for long-range base pairs (500+ nucleotides apart), both of which are well known to be challenging for the current models. Availability and implementation: Our source code is available at https://github.com/LinearFold/LinearFold, and our webserver is at http://linearfold.org (sequence limit: 100 000nt). Supplementary information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

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  • The left-to-right dynamic programming is equivalent to the bottom-up version but explores the search space incrementally from left to right.

    “Inspired by our previous work, LinearFold21, we further developed a left-to-right dynamic programming, which is equivalent to the above bottom-up version but explores the search space incrementally from left to right”

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Research works printed but not linked: 4

  1. Amman, 2013, Proceedings of the 8th Brazilian Symposium on Bioinformatics, BSB 2013, Recife, Brazil, 1
  2. Hofacker, 2014, RNA Folding: Methods and Protocols. Methods in Molecular Biology 1086, 1
  3. Huang, 2010, Proceedings of ACL. Uppsala, Sweden, 1077
  4. Tomita, 1988, Proceedings of ACL, 249

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Authors
Huang, L., Zhang, H., Deng, D., Zhao, K., Liu, K., Hendrix, D. A., & Mathews, D. H.
Affiliations
  • Oregon State University (US)
  • Baidu (China) (CN)
  • University of Rochester Medicine (US)
Corresponding author
Huang, Liang
Venue
Bioinformatics
Published
2019-07
Volume
35
Issue
14
Pages
i295-i304
ISSN
  • 1367-4803 (ISSN-L)
  • 1367-4811
OpenAlex
W2954102902
Cited by
207
References
63
Citations by year
2026: 34 · 2025: 41 · 2024: 44 · 2023: 38 · 2022: 25 · 2021: 11 · 2020: 10 · 2019: 4
FWCI
4.71
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Locations
  • Bioinformatics (publishedVersion, cc-by-nc)
  • PubMed Central (publishedVersion, cc-by-nc)
  • PubMed (publishedVersion)
  • arXiv (Cornell University) (submittedVersion)
  • arXiv (Cornell University)
Funders
  • National Science Foundation (IIS-1656051, IIS-1817231)
  • National Institutes of Health (R56 AG053460, R21 AG052950, R01 GM076485)
Topics
  • Life Sciences › Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology › Molecular Biology › RNA and protein synthesis mechanisms
  • Life Sciences › Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology › Molecular Biology › Genomics and Phylogenetic Studies
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Algorithms and Data Compression
Keywords
RNA secondary structure prediction, RNA folding, beam search, incremental parsing, context-free grammars, 16S rRNA, 23S rRNA
MeSH terms
Nucleic Acid Conformation, RNA, Software, Sequence Analysis, RNA, RNA Folding

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