Using folding ensemble and stem probability maximization methods to predict RNA H-type pseudoknots

We present in this paper an ab initio method, named KnotFold, for RNA H-type pseudoknot prediction. Our method employs an ensemble of RNA folding tools and a filtering heuristic to generate a set of pseudoknot-free stems, and then predicts pseudoknots by utilizing a search technique with a pseudo-probability scoring scheme. Experimental results show that KnotFold achieves higher sensitivity than existing methods. The KnotFold package with documentation is freely available at http://bioinformatics.njit.edu/KnotFold.