A comprehensive web tool for toehold switch design.

Motivation: Toehold switches are a class of RNAs with a hairpin loop that can be unfolded upon binding a trigger RNA, thereby exposing a ribosome binding site (RBS) and permitting translation of the reporter protein. They have been shown very useful in detecting a variety of targets including RNAs from Zika and Ebola viruses. The base complementation between the toehold switch and the trigger RNA also makes it sensitive to sequence variations. Design of toehold switches involves a series of considerations related to their sequence properties, structures and specificities.

Results: Here we present the first comprehensive web tool for designing toehold switches. We also propose a score for predicting the efficacy of designed toehold switches based on properties learned from ∼180 experimentally tested switches.

Availability and implementation: The toehold switch web tool is available at https://yiplab.cse.cuhk.edu.hk/toehold/.