SilentMutations (SIM): A tool for analyzing long-range RNA–RNA interactions in viral genomes and structured RNAs

A single nucleotide change in the coding region can alter the amino acid sequence of a protein. In consequence, natural or artificial sequence changes in viral RNAs may have various effects not only on protein stability, function and structure but also on viral replication. In recent decades, several tools have been developed to predict the effect of mutations in structured RNAs such as viral genomes or non-coding RNAs. Some tools use multiple point mutations and also take coding regions into account. However, none of these tools was designed to specifically simulate the effect of mutations on viral long-range interactions. Here, we developed SilentMutations (SIM), an easy-to-use tool to analyze the effect of multiple point mutations on the secondary structures of two interacting viral RNAs. The tool can simulate disruptive and compensatory mutants of two interacting single-stranded RNAs. This allows a fast and accurate assessment of key regions potentially involved in functional long-range RNA–RNA interactions and will eventually help virologists and RNA-experts to design appropriate experiments. SIM only requires two interacting single-stranded RNA regions as input. The output is a plain text file containing the most promising mutants and a graphical representation of all interactions. We applied our tool on two experimentally validated influenza A virus and hepatitis C virus interactions and we were able to predict potential double mutants for in vitro validation experiments. The source code and documentation of SIM are freely available at github.com/desiro/silentMutations.