Molecular circadian rhythms are robust in marine annelids lacking rhythmic behavior.

The circadian clock controls behavior and metabolism in various organisms. However, the exact timing and strength of rhythmic phenotypes can vary significantly between individuals of the same species. This is highly relevant for rhythmically complex marine environments where organismal rhythmic diversity likely permits the occupation of different microenvironments. When investigating circadian locomotor behavior of Platynereis dumerilii, a model system for marine molecular chronobiology, we found strain-specific, high variability between individual worms. The individual patterns were maintained for several weeks. A diel head transcriptome comparison of behaviorally rhythmic versus arrhythmic wild-type worms showed that 24-h cycling of core circadian clock transcripts is identical between both behavioral phenotypes. While behaviorally arrhythmic worms showed a similar total number of cycling transcripts compared to their behaviorally rhythmic counterparts, the annotation categories of their transcripts, however, differed substantially. Consistent with their locomotor phenotype, behaviorally rhythmic worms exhibit an enrichment of cycling transcripts related to neuronal/behavioral processes. In contrast, behaviorally arrhythmic worms showed significantly increased diel cycling for metabolism- and physiology-related transcripts. The prominent role of the neuropeptide pigment-dispersing factor (PDF) in Drosophila circadian behavior prompted us to test for a possible functional involvement of Platynereis pdf. Differing from its role in Drosophila, loss of pdf impacts overall activity levels but shows only indirect effects on rhythmicity. Our results show that individuals arrhythmic in a given process can show increased rhythmicity in others. Across the Platynereis population, rhythmic phenotypes exist as a continuum, with no distinct "boundaries" between rhythmicity and arrhythmicity. We suggest that such diel rhythm breadth is an important biodiversity resource enabling the species to quickly adapt to heterogeneous or changing marine environments. In times of massive sequencing, our work also emphasizes the importance of time series and functional tests.

DrForna: visualization of cotranscriptional folding.

MOTIVATION: Understanding RNA folding at the level of secondary structures can give important insights concerning the function of a molecule. We are interested to learn how secondary structures change dynamically during transcription, as well as whether particular secondary structures form already during or only after transcription. While different approaches exist to simulate cotranscriptional folding, the current strategies for visualization are lagging behind. New, more suitable approaches are necessary to help with exploring the generated data from cotranscriptional folding simulations. RESULTS: We present DrForna, an interactive visualization app for viewing the time course of a cotranscriptional RNA folding simulation. Specifically, users can scroll along the time axis and see the population of structures that are present at any particular time point. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: DrForna is a JavaScript project available on Github at https://github.com/ViennaRNA/drforna and deployed at https://viennarna.github.io/drforna.

Advanced Design of Structural RNAs Using RNARedPrint.

RNA design addresses the need to build novel RNAs, e.g., for biotechnological applications in synthetic biology, equipped with desired functional properties. This chapter describes how to use the software RNARedPrint for the de novo rational design of RNA sequences adopting one or several desired secondary structures. Depending on the application, these structures could represent alternate configurations or kinetic pathways. The software makes such design convenient and sufficiently fast for practical routine, where it even overcomes notorious problems in the application of RNA design, e.g., it maintains realistic GC content.

Ligand-dependent tRNA processing by a rationally designed RNase P riboswitch.

We describe a synthetic riboswitch element that implements a regulatory principle which directly addresses an essential tRNA maturation step. Constructed using a rational in silico design approach, this riboswitch regulates RNase P-catalyzed tRNA 5'-processing by either sequestering or exposing the single-stranded 5'-leader region of the tRNA precursor in response to a ligand. A single base pair in the 5'-leader defines the regulatory potential of the riboswitch both in vitro and in vivo. Our data provide proof for prior postulates on the importance of the structure of the leader region for tRNA maturation. We demonstrate that computational predictions of ligand-dependent structural rearrangements can address individual maturation steps of stable non-coding RNAs, thus making them amenable as promising target for regulatory devices that can be used as functional building blocks in synthetic biology.

Evolving methods for rational de novo design of functional RNA molecules.

Artificial RNA molecules with novel functionality have many applications in synthetic biology, pharmacy and white biotechnology. The de novo design of such devices using computational methods and prediction tools is a resource-efficient alternative to experimental screening and selection pipelines. In this review, we describe methods common to many such computational approaches, thoroughly dissect these methods and highlight open questions for the individual steps. Initially, it is essential to investigate the biological target system, the regulatory mechanism that will be exploited, as well as the desired components in order to define design objectives. Subsequent computational design is needed to combine the selected components and to obtain novel functionality. This process can usually be split into constrained sequence sampling, the formulation of an optimization problem and an in silico analysis to narrow down the number of candidates with respect to secondary goals. Finally, experimental analysis is important to check whether the defined design objectives are indeed met in the target environment and detailed characterization experiments should be performed to improve the mechanistic models and detect missing design requirements.

Fixed-parameter tractable sampling for RNA design with multiple target structures.

BACKGROUND: The design of multi-stable RNA molecules has important applications in biology, medicine, and biotechnology. Synthetic design approaches profit strongly from effective in-silico methods, which substantially reduce the need for costly wet-lab experiments. RESULTS: We devise a novel approach to a central ingredient of most in-silico design methods: the generation of sequences that fold well into multiple target structures. Based on constraint networks, our approach supports generic Boltzmann-weighted sampling, which enables the positive design of RNA sequences with specific free energies (for each of multiple, possibly pseudoknotted, target structures) and GC-content. Moreover, we study general properties of our approach empirically and generate biologically relevant multi-target Boltzmann-weighted designs for an established design benchmark. Our results demonstrate the efficacy and feasibility of the method in practice as well as the benefits of Boltzmann sampling over the previously best multi-target sampling strategy-even for the case of negative design of multi-stable RNAs. Besides empirically studies, we finally justify the algorithmic details due to a fundamental theoretic result about multi-stable RNA design, namely the #P-hardness of the counting of designs. CONCLUSION: introduces a novel, flexible, and effective approach to multi-target RNA design, which promises broad applicability and extensibility. Our free software is available at: https://github.com/yannponty/RNARedPrint Supplementary data are available online.

In silico design of ligand triggered RNA switches.

This contribution sketches a work flow to design an RNA switch that is able to adapt two structural conformations in a ligand-dependent way. A well characterized RNA aptamer, i.e., knowing its Kd and adaptive structural features, is an essential ingredient of the described design process. We exemplify the principles using the well-known theophylline aptamer throughout this work. The aptamer in its ligand-binding competent structure represents one structural conformation of the switch while an alternative fold that disrupts the binding-competent structure forms the other conformation. To keep it simple we do not incorporate any regulatory mechanism to control transcription or translation. We elucidate a commonly used design process by explicitly dissecting and explaining the necessary steps in detail. We developed a novel objective function which specifies the mechanistics of this simple, ligand-triggered riboswitch and describe an extensive in silico analysis pipeline to evaluate important kinetic properties of the designed sequences. This protocol and the developed software can be easily extended or adapted to fit novel design scenarios and thus can serve as a template for future needs.

RNAblueprint: flexible multiple target nucleic acid sequence design.

MOTIVATION: Realizing the value of synthetic biology in biotechnology and medicine requires the design of molecules with specialized functions. Due to its close structure to function relationship, and the availability of good structure prediction methods and energy models, RNA is perfectly suited to be synthetically engineered with predefined properties. However, currently available RNA design tools cannot be easily adapted to accommodate new design specifications. Furthermore, complicated sampling and optimization methods are often developed to suit a specific RNA design goal, adding to their inflexibility. RESULTS: We developed a C ++ library implementing a graph coloring approach to stochastically sample sequences compatible with structural and sequence constraints from the typically very large solution space. The approach allows to specify and explore the solution space in a well defined way. Our library also guarantees uniform sampling, which makes optimization runs performant by not only avoiding re-evaluation of already found solutions, but also by raising the probability of finding better solutions for long optimization runs. We show that our software can be combined with any other software package to allow diverse RNA design applications. Scripting interfaces allow the easy adaption of existing code to accommodate new scenarios, making the whole design process very flexible. We implemented example design approaches written in Python to demonstrate these advantages. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: RNAblueprint , Python implementations and benchmark datasets are available at github: https://github.com/ViennaRNA . CONTACT: s.hammer@univie.ac.at, ivo@tbi.univie.ac.at or sven@tbi.univie.ac.at. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

Forna (force-directed RNA): Simple and effective online RNA secondary structure diagrams.

MOTIVATION: The secondary structure of RNA is integral to the variety of functions it carries out in the cell and its depiction allows researchers to develop hypotheses about which nucleotides and base pairs are functionally relevant. Current approaches to visualizing secondary structure provide an adequate platform for the conversion of static text-based representations to 2D images, but are limited in their offer of interactivity as well as their ability to display larger structures, multiple structures and pseudoknotted structures. RESULTS: In this article, we present forna, a web-based tool for displaying RNA secondary structure which allows users to easily convert sequences and secondary structures to clean, concise and customizable visualizations. It supports, among other features, the simultaneous visualization of multiple structures, the display of pseudoknotted structures, the interactive editing of the displayed structures, and the automatic generation of secondary structure diagrams from PDB files. It requires no software installation apart from a modern web browser. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: The web interface of forna is available at http://rna.tbi.univie.ac.at/forna while the source code is available on github at www.github.com/pkerpedjiev/forna. CONTACT: pkerp@tbi.univie.ac.at SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

Thermodynamic and kinetic folding of riboswitches.

Riboswitches are structured RNA regulatory elements located in the 5'-UTRs of mRNAs. Ligand-binding induces a structural rearrangement in these RNA elements, effecting events in downstream located coding sequences. Since they do not require proteins for their functions, they are ideally suited for computational analysis using the toolbox of RNA structure prediction methods. By their very definition riboswitch function depends on structural change. Methods that consider only the thermodynamic equilibrium of an RNA are therefore of limited use. Instead, one needs to employ computationally more expensive methods that consider the energy landscape and the folding dynamics on that landscape. Moreover, for the important class of kinetic riboswitches, the mechanism of riboswitch function can only be understood in the context of co-transcriptional folding. We present a computational approach to simulate the dynamic behavior of riboswitches during co-transcriptional folding in the presence and absence of a ligand. Our investigations show that the abstraction level of RNA secondary structure in combination with a dynamic folding landscape approach is expressive enough to understand how riboswitches perform their function. We apply our approach to a experimentally validated theophylline-binding riboswitch.

Computational design of RNAs with complex energy landscapes.

RNA has become an integral building material in synthetic biology. Dominated by their secondary structures, which can be computed efficiently, RNA molecules are amenable not only to in vitro and in vivo selection, but also to rational, computation-based design. While the inverse folding problem of constructing an RNA sequence with a prescribed ground-state structure has received considerable attention for nearly two decades, there have been few efforts to design RNAs that can switch between distinct prescribed conformations. We introduce a user-friendly tool for designing RNA sequences that fold into multiple target structures. The underlying algorithm makes use of a combination of graph coloring and heuristic local optimization to find sequences whose energy landscapes are dominated by the prescribed conformations. A flexible interface allows the specification of a wide range of design goals. We demonstrate that bi- and tri-stable "switches" can be designed easily with moderate computational effort for the vast majority of compatible combinations of desired target structures. RNAdesign is freely available under the GPL-v3 license.