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Self-Playing RNA Inverse Folding

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Abstract

Ribonucleic acid (RNA) sequence controls many biological functions in the body of living organisms including protein synthesis and gene regulations. The sequence folds according to the low Minimum Free Energy (MFE) which enables it to achieve various roles. Given a target RNA structure, an RNA sequence can be designed to fold accordingly in a process called RNA Inverse Folding. In this paper, we present an RNA Inverse Folding model that performs a single-step look-ahead to select optimal RNA base and base pairs to design RNA sequences. Our proposed model (SPRNA) learns to accurately design RNA sequences based on self-improving policy function. The model recorded state-of-the-art results on two test datasets and very competitive results on others.

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Data availability

All the datasets used in this work are publicly available. All the references for training and testing datasets are provided in Table 1.

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Acknowledgements

This work was granted access to the HPC/AI resources of IDRIS under the allocation 2023-AD010614071 made by GENCI.

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  1. LIASD, University of Paris 8, Saint-Denis, France

    Stephen Obonyo & Nicolas Jouandeau

  2. SCES, Strathmore University, Nairobi, Kenya

    Dickson Owuor

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Correspondence to Stephen Obonyo.

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This article is part of the topical collection “Advances on Computational Intelligence 2022” guest edited by Joaquim Filipe, Kevin Warwick, Janusz Kacprzyk, Thomas Bäck, Bas van Stein, Christian Wagner, Jonathan Garibaldi, H. K. Lam, Marie Cottrell and Faiyaz Docto.

Appendices

Appendix 1 Value Network Training

The value network was trained according to the following parameters and hyperparameter constraints. These were selected using Optuna [1]. framework (Table 10).

Table 10 Parameter/hyperparameter for the value network
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Appendix 2 One-Hot Feature Encoding Results

The experiments according to one-hot encoding did not yield better scores compared to the coding scheme of the results presented in the experiment section of this paper (Table 11).

Table 11 SPRNA with one-hot encoding
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Appendix 3 Software and Hardware Settings

The SPRNA was trained with PyTorch 1.13 and Python 3.7. All the experiments were run on NVIDIA V100.

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Obonyo, S., Jouandeau, N. & Owuor, D. Self-Playing RNA Inverse Folding. SN COMPUT. SCI. 5, 403 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42979-024-02659-x

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