Visualization of Barrier Tree Sequences Revisited

Abstract

The increasing complexity of models for prediction of the native spatial structure of RNA molecules requires visualization methods that help to analyze and understand the models and their predictions. This paper improves the visualization method for sequences of barrier trees previously published by the authors. The barrier trees of these sequences are rough topological simplifications of changing folding landscapes — energy landscapes in which kinetic folding takes place. The folding landscapes themselves are generated for RNA molecules where the number of nucleotides increases. Successive landscapes are thus correlated and so are the corresponding barrier trees. The landscape sequence is visualized by an animation of a barrier tree that changes with time.