Eterna Participants

Abstract Designing single molecules that compute general functions of input molecular partners is a major unsolved challenge in molecular design. Here we demonstrate that high-throughput, iterative experimental testing of diverse RNA designs crowdsourced from the online game Eterna yields sensors of increasingly complex functions of input oligonucleotide concentrations.

Abstract Functional design of ribosomes with mutant ribosomal RNA (rRNA) can expand opportunities for understanding molecular translation, building cells from the bottom-up, and engineering ribosomes with altered capabilities. However, such efforts are hampered by cell viability constraints, an enormous combinatorial sequence space, and limitations on large-scale, 3D design of RNA structures and functions.

Initial feature generation As a starting point for Kaggle teams, we supplied a collection of features for each RNA sequence, including the minimum free energy (MFE) structure according to the ViennaRNA 2 energy model23, ‘loop type’, or secondary structure type assignments generated with bpRNA24 (S = Stem, I = Internal loop, B = Bulge, H = Hairpin, M = Multiloop, X = external loop, E = end, terminology adopted from bpRNA) and the base-pair probability matrix according to the EternaFold22...