Figure 1.

Conformations of minimum free energy predicted for both strands of ELVd (reference variant). (A) Structure 1+ generated for ELVd (+) RNA by the Mfold and RNAstructure softwares for RNA folding. RNAstructure and RNAfold additionally produced structures 2+ and 3+ with minor modifications affecting the right terminal bifurcation (insets). (B) Structure 2- generated for ELVd (−) RNA by the 3 softwares. RNAstructure additionally produced structure 1- with a small cruciform motif in the central domain. Sequences forming the hammerhead structures are delimited by flags, motifs conserved in natural hammerhead structures are denoted by bars, and self-cleavage sites are marked by arrows. Solid and open symbols refer to plus and minus polarities, respectively. The same numbers are used for both polarities.