the bioinformatics chat

In this episode, I talk to Fernando Portela, a software engineer and amateur scientist who works on RNA design — the problem of composing an RNA sequence that has a specific secondary structure.

We talk about how Fernando and others compete and collaborate in designing RNA molecules in the online game EteRNA and about Fernando’s new RNA design algorithm, NEMO, which outperforms all prior published methods by a wide margin.

Links:

• The EteRNA game
• The preprint about NEMO
• NEMO project page
• Single-cell RNABIO & organoids meeting in Kiev

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