Command-Line Tools#

The ViennaRNA Package comes with a number of executable programs that provide command line interfaces to the most important algorithms implemented in RNAlib.

Find an overview of these programs and their corresponding manual pages below.

Main Programs#

RNA2Dfold

Compute MFE structure, partition function and representative sample structures of k,l neighborhoods

RNAaliduplex

Predict conserved RNA-RNA interactions between two alignments

RNAalifold

Calculate secondary structures for a set of aligned RNA sequences

RNAcofold

Calculate secondary structures of two RNAs with dimerization

RNAdistance

Calculate distances between RNA secondary structures

RNAdos

Calculate the density of states for each energy band of an RNA

RNAduplex

Compute the structure upon hybridization of two RNA strands

RNAeval

Evaluate free energy of RNA sequences with given secondary structure

RNAfold

Compute the minimum free energy structure and base pair probabilities for an RNA sequence.

RNAheat

Calculate the specific heat (melting curve) of an RNA sequence

RNAinverse

Find RNA sequences with given secondary structure (sequence design)

RNALalifold

Calculate locally stable secondary structures for a set of aligned RNAs

RNALfold

Calculate locally stable secondary structures of long RNAs

RNAmultifold

Compute thermodynamic properties for interaction complexes of multiple RNAs

RNApaln

RNA alignment based on sequence base pairing propensities

RNApdist

Calculate distances between thermodynamic RNA secondary structures ensembles

RNAparconv

Convert energy parameter files from ViennaRNA 1.8 to 2.0 format

RNAPKplex

Predict RNA secondary structures including pseudoknots

RNAplex

Find targets of a query RNA

RNAplfold

Calculate average pair probabilities for locally stable secondary structures

RNAplot

Draw RNA Secondary Structures in PostScript, SVG, or GML

RNApvmin

Calculate a perturbation vector that minimizes discrepancies between predicted and observed pairing probabilities

RNAsnoop

Find targets of a query H/ACA snoRNA

RNAsubopt

Calculate suboptimal secondary structures of RNAs

RNAup

Calculate the thermodynamics of RNA-RNA interactions

Additional Programs#

We include the following additional programs in our distribution of the ViennaRNA Package. Whether or not they are installed together with the ViennaRNA Package depends on its /configuration.

AnalyseDists

Analyse a distance matrix

AnalyseSeqs

Analyse a set of sequences of common length

Kinfold

Simulate kinetic folding of RNA secondary structures

kinwalker

Predict RNA folding trajectories

RNAforester

Compare RNA secondary structures via forest alignment

RNAlocmin

Calculate local minima from structures via gradient walks

RNAxplorer

Explore the RNA conformation space through sampling and other techniques

Utilities#

We also ship a number of small utilities, many of them to manipulate the PostScript files produced by the structure prediction programs RNAfold and RNAalifold.

Tip

Most of the Perl 5 utilities contain embedded pod documentation. Type e.g.

perldoc relplot.pl

for detailed instructions.

Tool Name

Description

ct2db

Produce dot bracket notation of an RNA secondary structure
given as mfold .ct file

b2mt.pl

Produce a mountain representation of a secondary structure
from it’s dot-bracket notation, as produced by RNAfold.
Output consists of simple x y data suitable as input to a
plotting program. The mountain representation is a xy plot with
sequence position on the x-axis and the number of base pairs
enclosing that position on the y-axis.

Example:

RNAfold < my.seq | b2mt.pl | xmgrace -pipe
mountain plot for 5S RNA

cmount.pl

Produce a PostScript mountain plot from a color dot plot as
created by RNAalifold -p or alidot -p. Each base pair
is represented by a trapez whose color encodes the number of
consistent and compensatory mutations supporting that pair:
Red marks pairs with no sequence variation; ochre, green, turquoise,
blue, and violet mark pairs with 2,3,4,5,6 different types of pairs,
respectively.

Example:

cmount.pl alidot.ps > cmount.ps
color anotated TAR hairpin

coloraln.pl

Reads a sequence alignment in CLUSTAL format and a consensus
secondary structure (which it extracts from a secondary structure
plot as produced by RNAalifold), and produces a postscript figure
of the alignment annotated using the consensus structure, coloring
base pair using the same color scheme as cmount.pl, RNAalifold
and alidot.

Example:

coloraln.pl -s alirna.ps file.aln > coloraln.ps
colored TAR alignment

colorrna.pl

Reads a consensus secondary structure plot and a color dot plot
as produced by RNAalifold -p, and writes a new secondary
structure plot in which base pairs a colored using the color
information from the dot plot.

Example:

colorrna.pl alirna.ps alidot.ps > colorRNA.ps

mountain.pl

Similar to b2mt.pl, but produces a mountain plot from the
pair probabilities contained in a PostScript dot plot. It write
3 sets of x y data, suitable as input for a plot program. The
first two sets containing the mountain representation from pair
probabilities and MFE structure, the third set is the
“positional entropy” a measure of structural well-definedness.

Example:

mountain.pl dot.ps | xmgrace -pipe
color mountain plot for HIV TAR hairpin

refold.pl

Refold using consensus structure as constraint

relplot.pl

Reads a postscript secondary structure plot and a dot plot
containing pair probabilities as produced by RNAfold -p,
and produces a new structure plot, color annotated with reliability
information in the form of either pair probabilities or positional
entropy (default).

Example:

relplot.pl foo_ss.ps foo_dp.ps > foo_rss.ps
structure of a 5s rRNA with reliability annotation

rotate_ss.pl

Reads a postscript secondary structure plot as produced by
RNAfold and produces a new rotated and/or mirrored
structure plot.

Example:

rotate_ss.pl -a 30 -m foo_ss.ps > foo_new_ss.ps

switch.pl

Design sequences that can adopt two different structure, i.e.
design RNA switches. The program will sample the set of sequences
compatible with two input structures in order to find sequences with
desired thermodynamic and kinetic properties. In particular it is
possible to specify two different temperatures such that structure
1 is favored at T1 and structure 2 at T2 to design temperature
sensitive switches (RNA thermometers). The desired height of the
energy barrier separating the two structures, thus determining
the refolding time between meta-stable states.

RNAdesign.pl

Flexible design of multi-stable RNA molecules. An initially random
sequence is iteratively mutated and evaluated according to an
objective function (see Option: --optfun). Whenever a better
scoring sequence has been found, the mutation is accepted, the
algorithm terminates once a local minimum is found. This script
makes heavy use of the RNA::Design sub-package that comes
with the ViennaRNA Package Perl 5 interface.