Integrated pretraining with evolutionary information to improve RNA secondary structure prediction

AO_SCPLOWBSTRACTC_SCPLOWRNA secondary structure prediction is a fundamental task in computational and molecular biology. While machine learning approaches in this area have been shown to improve upon traditional RNA folding algorithms, performance remains limited for several reasons such as the small number of experimentally determined RNA structures and suboptimal use of evolutionary information. To address these challenges, we introduce a practical and effective pretraining strategy that enables learning from a larger set of RNA sequences with computationally predicted structures and in the meantime, tapping into the rich evolutionary information available in databases such as Rfam. Coupled with a flexible and scalable neural architecture that can navigate different learning scenarios while providing ease of integrating evolutionary information, our approach significantly improves upon state-of-the-art across a range of benchmarks, including both single sequence and alignment based structure prediction tasks, with particularly notable benefits on new, less well-studied RNA families. Our source code, data and packaged RNA secondary structure prediction software RSSMFold can be accessed at https://github.com/HarveyYan/RSSMFold.