Unfortunately, we don’t. The data that you guys see is really the “real” data that we get back (with a tiny bit of processing on top). The good news is that is’s sufficiently detailed to give us pretty good confidence that if the reactivities are correct, then the RNA really folded into the right shape. The other good news is that the EteRNA community is doing groundbreaking work at designing RNAs. Totally serious.
So right now, the team is concentrating on writing up results from this stage of EteRNA and presenting to the world what our amazing community has been doing!
After that, we are contemplating tons of cool extensions, including moving to full 3D folding, but that naturally is going to require much more of everything: a fancy new interface and much more expensive experiments.
Adrien, Very respectfully (I know how difficult all this must be and how hard the entire ETERNA team has worked to make this a reality) I suggest that this interface is SOOOO user friendly that young students could easily master the structure of RNA using it. As a teacher, i would love to have a one stop shop to teach a unit on Nucleic acids. Could you and the team consider adding material the includes DNA. And perhaps the structure of the nucleotides. I know this far exceeds the goals of the ETERNA team, but I have just found this to be such a great portal to visualize how a biomolecule functions, especially one as complex as an RNA polymer. Maybe someone could do an extension to this with the same interface that is so easy to use - call it a prelab (like the tutorials) and it must be mastered before moving on?
Anyway, keep up your brillant work! I’ll try to do my part down here at the high school level.
Synthesizing a much larger number of RNAs per week. (This would also change the voting interface, and might supplant (1)).
Designing RNA “switches” and ultimately RNA computational elements.
3D EteRNA.
All of these are in early planning, and will be dependent on the scientific funding climate. However, our most important and immediate goal right now (which has been keeping us very busy) is to write up a paper on the amazing results of the EteRNA community. When that’s done, we’re going to pivot back to concentrating on game advances.
We are so excited that EteRNA is being used in the classroom. Not only were we hoping that this tool would be used for eduction, but evidence of classroom use is very useful to us as we seek funding! As you suspect, our resources are stretched to the limit right now, but perhaps you could send me an e-mail with a more detailed explanation of your request (as well as any information on your experience using EteRNA in the classroom).
