Transcript design problem of oritatami systems

Abstract

RNA cotranscriptional folding refers to the phenomenon in which an RNA transcript folds upon itself while being synthesized out of a gene. Oritatami model is a computation model of this phenomenon, which lets its sequence (transcript) of beads (abstract molecules) fold cotranscriptionally by the interactions between beads according to its ruleset. We study the problem of designing a transcript that folds into the given conformation using the given ruleset, which is called the transcript design problem. We prove that the problem is computationally difficult to solve (NP-hard). Then we design efficient poly-time algorithms with additional restrictions on the oritatami system.