Ribo-LENS turns coarse base-pairing structure into a practical entry point for screening the vast, largely unexplored RNA target space, and depends far less on sequence homology than competing predictors.
Abstract
Ribo-LENS is a geometric deep-learning framework for detecting small-molecule binding sites in RNA structures. It is designed to exploit two properties of RNA base-pairing networks: their robustness to conformational fluctuation and the functional signatures they encode. By reasoning directly in the space of base-pairing subgraphs, Ribo-LENS assembles coherent binding sites, in contrast to methods that score residues independently. In extensive experiments, Ribo-LENS is competitive with, and often outperforms, large all-atom co-folding models (AlphaFold3, Chai-1), fine-tuned language models (GerNA-Bind), and structure-based tools (RNAsite), raising mean MCC to 0.380 (versus 0.321 for the state-of-the-art GerNA-Bind). It is strongly robust to apo/holo rearrangement, with its accuracy tracking the base-pairing graph (Spearman ρ = 0.82 with binding-site graph edit distance) rather than backbone displacement (ρ = −0.15 with RMSD), and depends far less on sequence homology than competing predictors. In an end-to-end, sequence-based virtual screen of the ROBIN assay (∼25,000 compounds), Ribo-LENS guides docking to a small predicted pocket, matching a blind all-atom cavity search (enrichment factors up to 6.1) at a fraction of the search cost; on two SARS-CoV-2 targets its predicted sites align with NMR chemical-shift perturbations. Ribo-LENS turns coarse base-pairing structure into a practical entry point for screening the vast, largely unexplored RNA target space.
CoBind is presented, a multitask deep learning framework that jointly predicts RNA–compound interactions and nucleotide-level binding-site probabilities within a unified architecture and provides complementary nucleotide-level binding-site localization, supporting a site-aware view of RNA–ligand recognition under distribution shift.
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The results demonstrate the effectiveness of integrating multi-scale and multi-modal representations with cross-scale alignment for protein–RNA affinity prediction, and suggest that M2-PRNet can highlight relevant RNA-binding regions and support preliminary discrimination between strong and weak binders when plausible complex structures are available.
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A pipeline reformulating kinase-substrate modeling as a Bayesian inference problem is presented and it is revealed that the interaction types and distances to the catalytic pocket significantly influence pathogenicity scores.
Jinyuan Hu, Shimian Li, Yue Xue et al.· Journal of Chemical Informat...· 0 citations
Accurate annotation of RNA base-pairing interactions is essential for structural analysis, benchmarking, and data-driven RNA structure prediction. Several tools can extract RNA interactions from three-dimensional coordinates, but their outputs are heterogeneous and may disagree, particularly for non-canonical base pairs. We present EXTRARNAS, a Java-based framework for automated, reproducible, and user-friendly large-scale extraction of RNA structural annotations with multiple tools. EXTRARNAS processes batches of RNA structures specified by PDB identifier and chain, or provided as local PDB files, executes annotation tools through a Docker-based environment, and parses tool-specific outputs using ANTLR4-based grammars. For each structure–tool pair, the framework generates standard BPSEQ files for canonical cis Watson–Crick interactions and introduces BPSEQE, a standardized text format for representing the extended secondary structure, preserving canonical, non-canonical, and multiple interactions per nucleotide. The current prototype supports RNAView, MC-Annotate, and RNAPolis Annotator. We demonstrate EXTRARNAS on eight RNA structures containing triple-helix motifs, comparing extracted canonical pairs against curated BPSEQ references and evaluating the recovery of manually validated Hoogsteen interactions. The results show consistent differences among tools, especially for non-canonical interactions, highlighting the need for standardized representations such as BPSEQE to support reproducible comparison and future consensus-based annotation.
Federico Di Petta, Piermichele Rosati, Piero Hierro Canchari et al.· bioRxiv· 0 citations
GRASSP provides a competitive framework for integrating pretrained RNA representations with spatial structural context while reducing reliance on additional handcrafted structural annotations, and is demonstrated to outperform state-of-the-art baselines.
Thi Lan Nguyen, N. Le· Bioinformatics· 0 citations
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