RiboBridge is a new structure-first framework for designing RNA molecules that bind to target proteins without assuming a predefined binding site. It separates RNA conformational generation from protein–RNA assembly by first proposing candidate binding interfaces on the protein surface, generating canonical RNA conformations in a pretrained RNA latent space (RiboSphere), and then predicting interaction constraints to bridge the RNA and protein coordinate frames. The predicted interaction geometry is converted into a geometrically consistent protein-relative pose via rigid placement, and RiboBridge outperforms existing methods on a benchmark of 124 protein–RNA complexes, achieving higher fNAT and DockQ scores and lower RMSDs.
By Zhou Zhang, Hanqun Cao, Minghao Sun, Odin Zhang, Yang Zhang, Pheng Ann Heng, Wujun Li, Tianfan Fu
La‑Ribo is a generative framework that jointly designs RNA nucleotide sequences and their three‑dimensional structures using geometry‑latent flow matching. It preserves a sparse phosphate‑sugar‑base scaffold while encoding nucleotide identity and local conformation in residue‑wise latent variables, which a shared flow network generates before an RNA‑specific decoder reconstructs all heavy atoms. The authors also built a large, quality‑controlled corpus of 168,561 RNA structures—combining experimental data with predictions from three folding models—to expand supervision, and demonstrate that La‑Ribo outperforms baselines in designability and co‑designability across sampling budgets and refolding models, while also enabling scaffold‑conditioned inverse folding without extra training.
By Runze Ma, Will Hua, Shuangjia Zheng
arXiv:2603. 19636v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Accurate RNA structure modeling remains difficult because RNA backbones are highly flexible, non-canonical interactions are prevalent, and experimentally determined 3D structures are comparatively scarce.
By Zhou Zhang, Hanqun Cao, Cheng Tan, Fang Wu, Pheng Ann Heng, Tianfan Fu
REFLEX is a sequence‑conditioned generator that produces RNA backbone‑frame ensembles using a heteroscedastic stochastic bridge on SE(3). It calibrates residue‑wise bridge widths with experimental B‑factors, allowing each observed conformer to be accessed through local perturbation neighborhoods while maintaining sharpness in constrained regions. In inference, REFLEX requires only the input sequence and, on a multi‑conformer RNA benchmark, achieves the best precision‑recall trade‑off for ensemble coverage across evaluation thresholds, with ablation studies showing improved target‑frame recovery under stronger perturbations.
By Wanli Ma, Tianmeng Hu, Ke Li
RNADynBench is a new standardized benchmark for RNA molecular dynamics, comprising 2,585 high‑quality 100‑nanosecond all‑atom trajectories with carefully controlled data splits. RNADynNet is a unified model that simultaneously generates RNA trajectories and extracts dynamics fingerprints from a single conformer, leveraging coordinate denoising, alignment, and physical grounding. The model achieves strong agreement with MD data, achieving RMSF correlations of 0.875 and 0.766 on test sets, including a high‑flexibility challenge set.
By Yiming Huang, Lennart Bastian, Hanqun Cao, Luis Vollmers, Tolga Birdal
arXiv:2611.04287v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Protein structure prediction has largely focused on native conformations, leaving the continuum of unfolded states, folding intermediates, an...
By Lisheng Zhang, Qingsong Li, Zinan Xie, Yanting Yang, Qikui Yang, Peng Lu, Zhican Fu, Wentao Cui, Runtong Hou, Zhengwei Xie
The paper introduces SIRGE, a sequence-informed geometric evaluator for RNA 3D structures that integrates nucleotide embeddings from a pretrained RNA language model into structural representations. SIRGE demonstrates superior performance over existing evaluators in Kendall–τ alignment, Top‑1 selection, and Top‑3 ranking. Controlled experiments reveal that sequence conditioning corrects errors of a purely geometric model and enhances target‑level ranking, suggesting that pretrained sequence representations provide complementary ranking information to geometric reasoning.
By Andrea Zerio, Yighua Yao, Alessandro Micheli, Roland G. Huber, Mile Sikic, Samir Bhatt, Andres R. Masegosa, Yuangang Pan
The paper introduces GOLD, a Geometric Optimized Latent Diffusion framework that jointly models RNA sequences and their side‑chain geometries in a unified latent space using a novel GeoVAE. By co‑diffusing sequence and structure and employing a gradient‑guided sampling step that enforces physical constraints, GOLD achieves superior performance in sequence recovery, secondary structure validity, and 3D foldability compared to existing inverse‑folding methods.
By Qi Si, Xuyang Liu, Penglei Wang, Shuo Su, Limei Han, Mengzhu Li, Xin Guo, Yuan Qi, Yuan Cheng
The paper introduces MCTH (Monte Carlo Tree Hallucination), an inference-only framework that performs all‑atom biomolecular sequence‑structure co‑design by treating pretrained folding and inverse‑folding models as black‑box operators. MCTH uses Monte Carlo Tree Search to allocate a fixed inference budget across competing design trajectories, incorporating model confidence, uncertainty, and cross‑expert consensus. Experiments across protein‑RNA, protein‑DNA, protein‑protein, and protein‑ligand design show that adaptive search outperforms simpler sampling strategies, and evaluations with AlphaFold3 and Chai‑1 demonstrate transferability beyond the search‑time oracle.
By Xuefeng Liu, Mingxuan Cao, Xiao Luo, Songhao Jiang, Tobin Sosnick, Jinbo Xu, Louis Maher, Rick Stevens
arXiv:2608. 16094v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Accurate protein structure prediction is fundamental to structural biology because protein structure underlies molecular function and provides a basis for mechanistic interpretation.
By Wengan He, Yongsheng Luo, Lihong Jiang, Wenhui Xu, Yu Li
mdRNAcat is a curated dataset of all-atom molecular dynamics simulations for 48 diverse RNA systems, each run with replica-exchange with solute scaling (REST2) across 32 Hamiltonian states and 200–300 ns per state. The dataset includes atomic coordinates, instantaneous forces, and forces re-evaluated under the unscaled reference Hamiltonian, along with structural annotations and replica-exchange metadata, all stored in a standardized HDF5 format. The authors analyze conformational sampling, exchange behavior, base pairing, and sugar-pucker distributions to characterize the simulated ensembles, positioning mdRNAcat as a reusable resource for developing and evaluating data-driven RNA models, including coarse-grained force fields.
By Anton E. Dorn, Emile de Bruyn, Fabrice von der Lehr, Philipp Knechtges, Stefan Kesselheim, Alexander Schug
arXiv:2506. 14488v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Structure-based drug design (SBDD) models are central to modern pharmaceutical research, enabling the rational exploration of protein-ligand interactions at atomic resolution.
By Dong Xu, Zhangfan Yang, Junchuang Cai, Sisi Yuan, Zexuan Zhu, Jianqiang Li, Junkai Ji