Designing of interacting RNAs using Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) algorithm

One of polymeric biological molecules called ribonucleic acid (RNA) is involved in diverse biological roles in regulation of gene expression. Generally, secondary structures of RNA determine their functions in living organisms. In medical field, various structures of synthetic RNAs are much needed at present. Recently, an RNA design tool has been developed to identify optimal RNA sequences for the desired interacting RNAs based on Genetic Algorithm (GA). In an attempt to improve the design tool, we applied Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) algorithm, which can outperform several population-based methods including GA. To achieve this goal, we developed an ABC-based RNA design tool and employed this tool to design 6 different interacting RNA models. The design performance from ABC-based tool for all models were compared with that from the existing GA-based tool. It was found that the ABC-based tool and the GA-based tools equally perform in all 6 models. Both tools can achieve the fitness score above 0.996. Although the ABC-based tool could be used to design interacting RNA more reliably, it seems to require more design time, especially in the models with larger RNA length. Thus, with further improvement, this tool shall be a promising tool for designing synthetic RNA devices for biomedical applications.