iTHEMS Biology Seminar by Prof. Zhichao (Chichau) Miao on November 24, 2022

In this week’s biology seminar, we have invited Prof. Zhichao Miao (Guangzhou Laboratory, China) to tell us about “RNA-Puzzles - the evaluation and automation of RNA 3D structure”. He introduced the development history and current situation of the RNA 3D structure prediction problem. With agreement from crystallographers, the RNA structures are predicted by various groups before the publication of the crystal structures. Systematic protocols for comparing models and crystal structures are described and analyzed. The technic is becoming routine and accurate. However, we are surprised that even with the great success of AlphaFold for protein structure prediction, the lack of information of RNA structure is still holding back the use of advanced supervised machine learning technics. The RNA-Puzzles project is working hard to open the great possibilities in this task. He also presented the results of predicting the viral RNA structures, including the SARS-CoV-2. We are looking forward to see the further development. In the seminar, we had many insightful questions and discussions. We are very thankful for Prof. Miao’s talk and this great communication opportunity.

Reported by Yingying Xu