Question

The Second assumption in predicting RNA secondary structure is that the energy associated with any position in the structure is _____ influenced by local sequence and structure.

(a) only

(b) not at all

(c) partially

(d) never

I have been asked this question at a job interview.

I'd like to ask this question from Limitations of Prediction in portion RNA Structure Prediction of Bioinformatics

Answer 1

Right answer is (a) only

Explanation: The energy associated with a particular base pair in a double-stranded region is assumed to be influenced only by the previous base pair and not by the base pairs farther down the double-stranded region or anywhere else in the structure. These energies can be reliably estimated by experimentation with small, synthetic RNA oligonucleotides recently improved to include sequence dependence.