Jiao Yuan
Author directory2026
Utilizing Geometric Structural Features for Functional RNA Design
Jiyue Jiang | Yuhan Chen | Xiangyu Shi | Yihan Ye | Han Huang | Yanyu Chen | Yuheng Shan | Dongchen He | Jiao Yuan | Yu Li
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Jiyue Jiang | Yuhan Chen | Xiangyu Shi | Yihan Ye | Han Huang | Yanyu Chen | Yuheng Shan | Dongchen He | Jiao Yuan | Yu Li
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
RNA’s conformational flexibility enables diverse biological functions but makes structure-guided design difficult. Although precise control of 3D structure is essential, existing methods often overlook the molecular surface, which critically shapes intermolecular interactions and functional outcomes. To address this, we propose gRFold, a multimodal framework that incorporates molecular surface information as a core design constraint. gRFold employs two geometric encoders: a Frame-Averaged Geometric Surface Encoder (FA-GSE) to learn E(3)-invariant surface features, and an Equivariant Backbone Graph Perceptron (EBGP) to capture backbone topology. The structural representations are integrated via hierarchical cross-attention to guide autoregressive generation; at inference, candidates are re-ranked by agreement between their predicted folds and the target base-pairing pattern. Across three RNA inverse-folding benchmarks covering RNA-protein complexes, monomeric RNAs and independently curated RNA-Puzzles targets, gRFold achieves strong sequence recovery and structural fidelity under both secondary-structure and 3D refolding evaluations, and ablations show that the surface and backbone branches contribute complementary gains. These results highlight the potential of surface-aware geometric modeling for structure-guided RNA design.
2025
RBPtool: A Deep Language Model Framework for Multi-Resolution RBP-RNA Binding Prediction and RNA Molecule Design
Jiyue Jiang | Yitao Xu | Zikang Wang | Yihan Ye | Yanruisheng Shao | Yuheng Shan | Jiuming Wang | Xiaodan Fan | Jiao Yuan | Yu Li
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Jiyue Jiang | Yitao Xu | Zikang Wang | Yihan Ye | Yanruisheng Shao | Yuheng Shan | Jiuming Wang | Xiaodan Fan | Jiao Yuan | Yu Li
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
RNA-binding proteins (RBPs) play essential roles in post-transcriptional gene regulation via recognizing specific RNA molecules as well as modulating several key physiological processes in cellulo, represented by alternative splicing and RNA degradation. Despite extensive research, most existing approaches still rely on superficial sequence features or coarse structural representations, limiting their ability to capture the intricate nature of RBP-RNA interactions. The recent surge in large language models (LLMs), combined with advances in geometric deep learning for extracting three-dimensional representations, enables the integration of multi-modal, multi-scale biological data for precise modeling and biologically informed de novo RNA design. In this work, we curate and extend RPI15223 into a multi-resolution, structure-level RBP-RNA dataset, and introduce RBPtool, a multi-task, multi-resolution framework that combines a geometric vector perception (GVP) module together with a deep language model encoder to fuse sequence and structural information. Our tool achieves state-of-the-art performance on public benchmarks and the RPI15223 dataset, while also supporting fine-grained level predictions and enabling de novo RNA design through a generative module conditioned on protein, cell-type, and specified species. RBPtool provides a fast and versatile platform for both fundamental RBP-RNA research and practical RNA drug design, delivering enhanced predictive accuracy and fine-grained structural insights.