Fig. 1

Binomial vs. Zipf distributions. a Samplings Binomial and Zipf distributions for the best binomial mutation rate \(\mu ^*\) (respectively \(c^*\) for the best Zipf exponent parameter). Both distributions have a mean of 8.7 point mutations for a sequence of length 88 nucleotides. b Tuning of binomial mutation rate parameter. For each \(\mu \in [0,1]\) with a step size of 0.005 and the pseudoknotted target PKB00342 of length 88, 50 sequences were designed using aRNAque. (b) shows the median generations and the success percentage vs. the mutation rate (\(\mu\)). The best mutation rate is \(\mu ^*=0.085\) (with a median number of generation 93.5 and a success rate of 92%). c Tuning of Levy exponent. Similar to (b), for each \(c \in [0,7]\) with a step size of 0.1 and for the same pseudoknotted target structure, 100 sequences were designed using aRNAque. It shows the median generations and the percentage of success vs. the exponent parameter (c). The Zipf exponent distribution that produced the highest success rate and the minimum number of generations is \(c^*=1.4\)