Where can I make new RNA strands to test out ideas?

I have an idea that I want to test out. Is there some sort of drawing-board that isn’t the labs?

raphael,

In fact, EteRNA team is working on creating a new section where people can just create RNA shape post them as a puzzle. That would be a perfect place to test your idea. We’ll post a news once the feature is up.

EteRNA

That’s great news! I was thinking even simpler, though, a sort of sandbox mode. For example, I might idly wonder what would happen if I were to make a sequence of AUs that alternated according to the Fibonnacci sequence (AAAUAUUA - A’s are absolute location according to Fibonacci) or (AUAUAUUA - U’s are distance between A’s according to Fibonaccu), how long it would go before folding. A place to make this a puzzle will be nifty in the extreme, but a place to make this just for the sake of making it (and presumably sharing to a communal library) would be even more so!

Regards,
raphael

You could just try that on a big puzzle, e.g. Chlamydomonas reinhardtii 1 (471 nucleotides).
Switch to Natural Mode before you start, so you’ll get a long straight line. Then place your As and Us and see what happens.

If you’re interested in trying our your puzzles now, try using one of the many RNA structure prediction sites such as:

http://rna.tbi.univie.ac.at/cgi-bin/R…
http://mfold.rna.albany.edu/?q=DINAMelt

These webpages are very good at the prediction side but not so good at the inverse folding side. Hence EteRNA.

Wow! That was a lot more cool stuff than I expected to hear about. Thank you very much!