Supercomputing RNA Structure at Argonne

Over at ALCF, Joan Koka writes that researchers at the National Cancer Institute are using Argonne supercomputers to advance disease studies by enhancing our understanding of RNA, biological polymers that are fundamentally involved in health and disease. “Getting the real functional structure, which is the 3-D structure, is very difficult to do experimentally, because the RNA polymer is too flexible,” he said. “This is why we rely on computational simulation. Simulations can be used to explore hundreds or thousands of possible conformational states that would eventually lead us to the most likely 3-D structure.”