This looks highly promising and several players have suggested similar ideas.
An image processing approach to computing distances between RNA secondary structures dot plots http://www.almob.org/content/pdf/1748…
Our new distance measure will be examined in two application problems that require the use of distances between RNA secondary structures. The first is the RNA design problem, also known as the inverse RNA folding problem. The goal in this problem is to design nucleotide sequences that fold to a given RNA secondary structure.
The second application problem for illustrating our proposed distance measure is to predict mutations that cause a conformational rearrangement. Certain RNA molecules can act as conformational switches, by alternating between two states, and thereby changing their functionality.
Our newly proposed distance measure shows benefit in this problem as well when compared to standard methods used for assessing the distance similarity between two RNA secondary structures
We illustrated our approach on the RNA design problem, as well as on an
application that utilizes the distance measure to detect conformational rearranging point mutations in an RNA sequence.