RNA Secondary Structure Modeling Following the IPANEMAP Workflow

The structure of RNA molecules and their complexes are crucial for understanding biology at the molecular level. Resolving these structures holds the key to understanding their manifold structure-mediated functions ranging from regulating gene expression to catalyzing biochemical processes. Predicting RNA secondary structure is a prerequisite and a key step to accurately model their three dimensional structure. Although dedicated modelling software are making fast and significant progresses, predicting an accurate secondary structure from the sequence remains a challenge. Their performance can be significantly improved by the incorporation of experimental RNA structure probing data. Many different chemical and enzymatic probes have been developed; however, only one set of quantitative data can be incorporated as constraints for computer-assisted modelling. IPANEMAP is a recent workflow based on RNAfold that can take into account several quantitative or qualitative data sets to model RNA secondary structure. This chapter details the methods for popular chemical probing (DMS, CMCT, SHAPE-CE, and SHAPE-Map) and the subsequent analysis and structure prediction using IPANEMAP.