RNA structure is a young field, but it is also evolving rapidly from a technical standpoint.   New techniques for solving, analyzing and interpreting RNA structures are vital for continued progress in the field of RNA Biology, and many of these approaches are being developed in our laboratory.  We pioneered a reduced representation for the RNA backbone that facilitated rapid structural analysis and motif discovery, and we then leveraged this approach to create the first programs for accurately modeling RNA into electron density.  We are working to make RNA crystallography easier and more accurate, we are developing new ways to interpret the architectural features of large RNA molecules, and we are finding new approaches to the prediction of structure from sequence.

Reduced representations of the RNA backbone enable accurate modeling into electron density.