AnnapuRNA: A scoring function for predicting RNA-small molecule binding poses

RNA is considered as an attractive target for new small molecule drugs. Designing active compounds can be facilitated by computational modeling. Most of the available tools developed for these prediction purposes, such as molecular docking or scoring functions, are parametrized for protein targets. The performance of these methods, when applied to RNA-ligand systems, is insufficient. To overcome these problems, we developed AnnapuRNA, a new knowledge-based scoring function designed to evaluate RNA-ligand complex structures, generated by any computational docking method. We also evaluated three main factors that may influence the structure prediction, i.e., the starting conformer of a ligand, the docking program, and the scoring function used. We applied the AnnapuRNA method for a post-hoc study of the recently published structures of the FMN riboswitch. Software is available at https://github.com/filipspl/AnnapuRNA.