RapidShapes is a runtime heuristic to speed up the computation of accumulated shape probabilities.

RNA shape abstraction maps structures to a tree-like domain of shapes, retaining adjacency and nesting of structural features, but disregarding helix lengths. Shape abstraction integrates well with dynamic programming algorithms, and hence it can be applied during structure prediction rather than afterwards. This avoids exponential explosion and can still give us a non-heuristic and complete account of properties of the molecule's folding space.

RNAshapes offers three powerful RNA analysis tools in one single software package:
1. Computation of a small set of representative structures of different shapes, complete in a well-defined sense.
2. Computation of accumulated shape probabilities.
3. Comparative prediction of consensus structures, as an alternative to the over-expensive Sankoff Algorithm.

An RNA shape is an abstract representation of an RNA secondary structure. It is inspired by the dot-bracket representation known from the Vienna RNA package.

The license of this software is Freeware, you can free download and free use this calculator software.