A grammatical approach to RNA-RNA interaction prediction

Much attention has been paid to RNA-RNA interaction involved in posttranscriptional regulation of gene expression. Although there have been a few studies on secondary structure prediction of interacting RNAs using dynamic programming (DP) algorithms, no grammar-based approach has been proposed. This paper provides a new modeling for RNA-RNA interaction based on multiple context-free grammar (MCFG). We present a polynomial time parsing (prediction) algorithm of the stochastic version of MCFG. Experimental results show that our approach is comparable to an existing work based on DP. The MCFG-based approach is more flexible than other DP-based methods. (C) 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.