Target prediction and a statistical sampling algorithm for RNA-RNA interaction

Motivation: It has been proven that the accessibility of the target sites has a critical influence on RNA-RNA binding, in general and the specificity and efficiency of miRNAs and siRNAs, in particular. Recently, O(N-6) time and O(N-4) space dynamic programming (DP) algorithms have become available that compute the partition function of RNA-RNA interaction complexes, thereby providing detailed insights into their thermodynamic properties. Results: Modifications to the grammars underlying earlier approaches enables the calculation of interaction probabilities for any given interval on the target RNA. The computation of the 'hybrid probabilities' is complemented by a stochastic sampling algorithm that produces a Boltzmann weighted ensemble of RNA-RNA interaction structures. The sampling of k structures requires only negligible additional memory resources and runs in O(k.N-3).