A pair of chemists from the University of Massachusetts Amherst have recently developed a novel tool which provides and unrivaled look into the mysterious world of RNA. The tool, dubbed iConRNA, is publicly available and could help solve the mystery of how diseases develop.
Described in a recent publication in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, iConRNA is the first tool which offers an efficient look into how phase separation works in RNA condensates.
"This is a topic with intense interest in the field," says Jianhan Chen, professor of chemistry at UMass Amherst. "It's not for lack of effort that a model like ours, iConRNA, hasn't existed until now; it's just that it's extremely hard to build."
Part of what makes the tool so powerful is its ability to resolve the balance of the driving force of phase separation, as well as predict how the balance is tuned in different cellular situations. "It allows you to 'turn the knob' of things like temperature and salt to see how they affect RNA's phase separation," Chen added.
Testing has demonstrated that the model’s performance tracks closely to experiment observations, allowing future researchers to get a closer look into the mysteries contained in each human cell.
iConRNA is publicly available and can be accessed via Github.