Evaluation of RNA secondary structure prediction for both base-pairing and topology

Abstract

Secondary structures of RNAs are crucial to the understanding of their tertiary structures and functions. At present, many theoretical methods are widely used to predict RNA secondary structures. The performance of these methods has been evaluated but only for their ability of base-pairing prediction. However, the topology of a RNA secondary structure is more important for understanding its tertiary structure and function, especially for long RNAs. In this paper, we constructed a new non-redundant RNA database containing 73 RNA with lengths of 50–300 nucleotides and benchmarked four popular algorithms for both base pairing and topology. The results show that the prediction accuracy of secondary structure topology is only 38%, in contrast to 70% for that of base pairing. Furthermore, the topological consistency is not strongly correlated to the base-pairing consistency. Our results will be helpful to understand the limitations of RNA secondary structure prediction methods from a different point of view and also to their improvements in future.