A Grammatical Approach to RNA‐RNA Interaction Prediction

Much attention has been paid to two interacting RNA molecules involved in post‐transcriptional control of gene expression. Although there have been a few studies on RNA‐RNA interaction prediction based on dynamic programming algorithm, no grammar‐based approach has been proposed. The purpose of this paper is to provide a new modeling for RNA‐RNA interaction based on multiple context‐free grammar (MCFG). We present a polynomial time parsing algorithm for finding the most likely derivation tree for the stochastic version of MCFG, which is applicable to RNA joint secondary structure prediction including kissing hairpin loops. Also, elementary tests on RNA‐RNA interaction prediction have shown that the proposed method is comparable to Alkan et al.'s method.