Abstract

Motivation. Over the recent years, the vision that RNA simply serves as information transfer molecules has dramatically changed. The study of the sequence/structure/function relationships in RNA is becoming more important. As a direct consequence, the total num-ber of experimentally solved RNA structures has dramatically in-creased and new computer tools for predicting RNA structure from sequence are rapidly emerging. Therefore, new and accurate meth-ods for assessing the accuracy of RNA structure models are clearly needed. Results. Here we introduce an all-atom knowledge-based potential for the assessment of RNA three-dimensional (3D) structures. We have benchmarked our new potential, called RASP, with two differ-ent decoy datasets composed of near-native RNA structures. In one of the benchmark sets, RASP was able to rank the closest model to