Question

Which of the following is correct about MFOLD?

(a) It uses the dynamic programming only

(b) It uses the thermodynamic calculations only

(c) It uses the both dynamic programming and thermodynamic calculations as well

(d) It doesn’t take into account the themoststablility of the secondary structures

I got this question by my school principal while I was bunking the class.

The doubt is from Ab Initio Approach topic in portion RNA Structure Prediction of Bioinformatics

Answer 1

The correct answer is (b) It uses the thermodynamic calculations only

The explanation is: It is a web-based program for RNA secondary structure prediction. It combines dynamic programming and thermodynamic calculations for identifying themostable secondary structures with the lowest energy. It also produces dot plots coupled with energy terms. This method is reliable for short sequences but becomes less accurate as the sequence length increases.