Joshua ElkingtonFounder and General Partner at Axial

Scientist Stories: Sowmya Ramaswamy Krishnan, RNA:Small molecule Interactions

Name: Scientist Stories: Sowmya Ramaswamy Krishnan, RNA:Small molecule Interactions
Uploaded: 2024-07-20T13:49:04+00:00
Duration: 1 min 19 s
Channel: Joshua Elkington
Description: In this poster presentation, Soumya Ramaswamy Krishnan from TCS Research outlines the major challenges in RNA–small molecule research—limited data, a…

20 Jul 2024 · 1 min

Watch on YouTube

1:19

In this poster presentation, Soumya Ramaswamy Krishnan from TCS Research outlines the major challenges in RNA–small molecule research—limited data, a shortage of computational tools, and expensive experimental methods. To address these, the team has created two freely accessible computational resources: the RNA Small Molecule Interaction Miner (RCM) database, which houses 2,501 curated RNA–small molecule interactions and offers extensive search, display, download, and upload functionalities; and the RSA-PRED web server, which provides predictive models for six RNA target families (aptamers, miRNAs, repeats, ribosomal RNAs, riboswitches, viral RNAs). RSA-PRED supports both single‑molecule calculations and batch processing, with the underlying code to be open‑sourced soon. The six binding‑affinity models achieve an average Pearson correlation of 0.83 and a mean absolute error of 0.66, surpassing existing QCRN classification models. The work is documented in a Journal of Molecular Biology paper (RSM) and an upcoming Bioinformatics manuscript (RSA-PRED). The presenter thanks the supervising team and invites contact via email for further queries.

Chapters

Good morning all, I am Soumya from TCS Research. I welcome you all to my poster presentation. So this is the title of my poster. In this field, there are several challenges. One is the data paucity, second is the lack of computational methods, and the experimental approaches are also quite expensive. To mitigate these issues, we have developed two computational resources, namely a database RNA Small Molecule Interaction Miner and a web server called RSA-PRED hosting models specific to six RNA target families, namely aptamers, miRNAs, repeats, ribosomal RNAs, riboswitches, and viral RNAs. Both these resources are freely available through the URLs shown below. The RCM database contains 2,501 RNA-small molecule interactions with a wide variety of search, display, download, and upload options. RSApred web server can handle single calculations, and for batch computations, we have also open sourced the code which will be released soon. The average metrics for the 6 binding affinity models are a Pearson correlation of 0.83 and an MAE of 0.66. All the models outperform the existing QCRN classification models reported in literature. The publications from this project are: the first RSM paper was published last year in Journal of Molecular Biology. This is the DOI from which you can access the paper. And the second paper, RSA-PRED, is currently under revision and briefings in Bioinformatics and will be out soon. This is our team. I sincerely thank my supervisors for the opportunity to work in this project. Please drop a mail to us if you have any questions. Thank you.