Relative Information Gain: Shannon entropy-based measure of the relative structural conservation in RNA alignments

Structural characterization of RNAs is a dynamic field, offeringmanymodelling possibilities. RNA secondary structure models are usually characterized by an encoding that depicts structural information of the molecule through string representations or graphs. In this work, we provide a generalization of the BEAR encoding (a context-aware structural encoding we previously developed) by expanding the set of alignments used for the construction of substitution matrices and then applying it to secondary structure encodings ranging from fine-grained to more coarse-grained representations. We also introduce a re-interpretation of the Shannon Information applied on RNA alignments, proposing a new scoring metric, the Relative Information Gain (RIG). The RIG score is available for any position in an alignment, showing how different levels of detail encoded in the RNA representation can contribute differently to convey structural information. The approaches presented in this study can be used alongside state-ofthe-art tools to synergistically gain insights into the structural elements that RNAs and RNA families are composed of. This additional information could potentially contribute to their improvement or increase the degree of confidence in the secondary structure of families and any set of aligned RNAs.

Automated summary

The study introduces a method for modeling the structural features of RNA, expanding alignment sets and introducing a new scoring metric to encode RNA structural information at different granularities. These approaches can be used in conjunction with other tools to gain insights into the structural elements of RNA.