Stanford's State-of-the-Art AI for Predicting RNA Structures

Predicting RNA (ribonucleic acid) structures may help accelerate the discovery and development of new drugs to treat diseases and disorders. A new Stanford study published in Science uses artificial intelligence (AI) machine learning to predict RNA structures with state-of-the-art performance results. "Few RNA structures are known, however, and predicting them computationally has proven challenging," wrote the Stanford scientists. "We introduce a machine learning approach that enables identification of accurate structural models without assumptions about their defining characteristics, despite being trained with only 18 known RNA structures." In molecular biology, RNA (ribonucleic acid) is involved in many important cellular functions.