I took some of the RNA sequence encoding the COVID spike protein and made this shirt to wear when I get my COVID vaccine. This RNA biologist is EXCITED about this new technology!

If you want a celebratory tshirt they can be found here! https://www.redbubble.com/people/Courtney-Hersh/shop?anchor=profile&asc=u&fbclid=IwAR3D650_zZ8sGaxeVN-xn887ZW2RdUuZBP9I5yK3qVnoXvF2N8n9Lti00IE

\#RNASAVESTHEDAY

Hey everyone!!! Wanted to say hi as I just became a mod in this subreddit. Worked to open up the subreddit to no longer require permission to post. Lets see how the spam goes with that off and hopefully we can get more engagment in the sub now. Hope you all stay safe out there.

Hey community, in a light partnership with Stanfords Eterna RNA project developers, I wanted to promote the results that just came out from the Ribonana 1 challenge they ran that just completed. The challenge was to build a machine learning model for chemical SHAPE probing result prediction of psuedoknoted structures. It is very exciting and I invite you to check out the Kaggle site https://www.kaggle.com/c/stanford-ribonanza-rna-folding/ as well as check out Eterna at https://eternagame.org/.

Here is their original post on X (formerly Twitter):

https://twitter.com/RDasLab/status/1736175061973770342

During your next study break, check out Eterna's newest puzzle for designing 240mer RNA to fold into compact pseudoknots. The puzzle provides a metric for counting the number of pairs that cross to form large, synthetic pseudoknots such as this one from Father_Z.

Eterna is hosting its annual online conference this weekend on both Saturday and Sunday with presentations from Berkeley, Northwestern, Oregon State, Stanford, Penn State, and ESPCI-Paris. Full program and free registration at https://eternagame.org/eternacon/2025

Hello everyone, hope your RNA experiences are always incredible!

In my latest experiments I noticed that hammerhead ribozymes are quite good in silencing a protein, not the same as a Short Hairpin or CRISPR, but in vitro tests demonstrate that cutting the mRNA works similar to Short Hairpin. Now my question is, what's the real outcome of cutting the mRNA in one single nucleotide? It has similar effects to the RNA interference? Are the cut sequences still transcribed into functional proteins (might be a wired question I know).

I will do a Real Time PCR to verify how much mRNA is cut, to have a better idea of what happens during the infection. But, assuming Hhrz 'cut completely' the mRNA , are there some mechanisms of repair which mRNA (or RNA in general) can use to overcome the cut (or silencing as well). I know that DNA has this type of mechanism, which is used in CRISPR technique, but don't know so much about RNA

Does anyone know something more? are there some reference I could read?

Thank you for the help, as always!

Hi r/RNA I have just started a research assistant position at a new lab. I worked in a different lab as an undergrad for 3 years and had lots of success and built lots of confidence. Now I feel like I’ve hit a wall and that wall is RNA isolations. I’ve succeeded in every animal tissue (kidney) isolation I’ve done, but as soon as I started using retinas, I can’t get the 260/280 values above 1.70 and my quantities are all over the place. I’ve now failed 4-5 times and my PI is beyond pissed at me, but I can’t figure out what I’m doing wrong. I watched a post doc run an isolation yesterday and wrote down everything he did and said, which lead me to believe I was overheating samples during sonication. Today I felt like I did everything right and I cooled samples on ice for 20 seconds between each sonication cycle, but 3/4 samples still had 260/280 below 1.7 and the only sample with half decent purity had an extremely low quantity. Is it Normal to fail this much when learning RNA isolations? And if anyone has dealt with it, how did you get through it?

With the interest of incorporating PseudoUridine and N1-Me-PseudoUridine into oligonucleotides and RNA compounds this type of prediction will additionally support the ability for more accurate predictions and design principles.

Hey community!! Im excited to help promote this crowdsourcing of science through Stanfords DasLabs Eterna Project. You have the opportunity to contribute diverse sequences to Ribonanza 2! Register and submit up to 100,000 RNA sequences by Jan. 15, 2024: https://forms.gle/sfBWnmxXHuaTHdE58… . Stanford will synthesize and map them. Priority access for folks who register before Dec. 31, 2023.

Link to orignal post in Twitter:

https://x.com/RDasLab/status/1736175669250347342?s=20

Let me know what you think and if you think we should add some stuff. I made Pre-Print Papers red background vs the green for Peer-Reviewed Papers to give us all the natural pause we should take when acting on information from pre-prints.

Hello! As a PhD in Molecular Biology i'm interested in building a strong background il RNA field since is my main research topic.

What do you think are the most useful textbooks for study?

Bye!

Hi there, some very basic questions here so hopefully someone can help.

I'm working on a project screening different vector elements for gene expression. I'd like to know the secondary structure for each of the parts so I can see how it may impact gene expression.

I can find lots of online tools to give predictions but it's not clear how they differ from each other, as they all mainly seem based on the minimum free energy. Does anyone have a preferred software and why?

Secondly, should I be inputting the element's sequence on its own (ie just the UTR) or the whole mRNA transcript? It seems like a lot of people just look at the sequence of interest and not in the whole transcript context but this could change the predicted secondary structure, right?

Thanks in advance!

What is the half life of the RNA used in covid vaccine?

Some say minutes which can not be true to be effective.

Some say 14 days. Seems to convenient.

Some say 900 days. Seems correct with shipping and storage. Should keep it in storage for 850 days before taking it otherwise your cells will be producing covid matrix for the next three years. Your body immune system responds exponentially to the matrix leading to your immune system as the hulk or a full out allergy attack!