RNAmutants is software and a web server to compute aspects of the energy landscape of secondary structures of k-point mutants of a given RNA sequence. Since there are 3^k n!/k! (n-k)! many k-point mutants of an RNA sequence of length n, a quantity which is roughly 3^k n^k, even for small values of k it is not feasible to obtain average energies by exhaustive enumeration.

RNAmutants uses two new algorithms described in the link References, in order to compute both expected energy and minimum free energy over all k-point mutants of a given RNA sequence without exhaustive enumeration.

We hope that RNAmutants will be of use in better understanding the molecular evolution of RNA molecules, which by virtue of base pairing has potentially different selective pressures than those exerted on DNA.

Enjoy!