UNC Bioinformatics and Computational Biology Graduate Student Chanin Tolson Woods paper published in Bioinformatics.

Congratulations to Chanin Tolson Woods (Laederach Lab) for her recent paper in Bioinformatics titled “Classification of RNA structure change by “gazing” at experimental data.” In this paper Chanin used a series of machine learning techniques to identify novel features that expert RNA scientists use when looking at RNA structure data. From these analyses, she was able to build an automatic classifier that replicates human annotation of the data with very high accuracy. This work also identified the specific things scientists do when looking at data including dynamic time warping. From a more practical perspective, Chanin’s work has the potential to save many future graduate students studying RNA structure from the tedious work of manually annotating their data. Chanin’s paper can be read at: (10.1093/bioinformatics/btx041).