Exploring the value of pro bono evaluation work as a method to build evaluator competencies and strengthen organizational capacity.

The Cultivating Evaluation Education and Development (CEED) program engages early career evaluators in an experiential learning experience by supporting them as they lead a pro bono evaluation for a local nonprofit community organization. We explored the value of this professional development to the early career evaluators, to the sponsor organization, and to the nonprofit organizations receiving CEED services by examining findings from six CEED projects. We found that early career evaluators self-reported gains in confidence and competence especially in four American Evaluation Association Evaluator Competencies (2018) domains - professional practice, methodology, planning and management, and interpersonal skills.

Bringing it home: expanding the local reach of dissemination and implementation training via a university-based workshop.

Background: Currently, national training programs do not have the capacity to meet the growing demand for dissemination and implementation (D&I) workforce education and development. The Colorado Research in Implementation Science Program (CRISP) developed and delivered an introductory D&I workshop adapted from national programs to extend training reach and foster a local learning community for D&I.

Methods: To gauge interest and assess learning needs, a pre-registration survey was administered.

On the importance of cotranscriptional RNA structure formation.

The expression of genes, both coding and noncoding, can be significantly influenced by RNA structural features of their corresponding transcripts. There is by now mounting experimental and some theoretical evidence that structure formation in vivo starts during transcription and that this cotranscriptional folding determines the functional RNA structural features that are being formed. Several decades of research in bioinformatics have resulted in a wide range of computational methods for predicting RNA secondary structures.

Transient RNA structure features are evolutionarily conserved and can be computationally predicted.

Functional RNA structures tend to be conserved during evolution. This finding is, for example, exploited by comparative methods for RNA secondary structure prediction that currently provide the state-of-art in terms of prediction accuracy. We here provide strong evidence that homologous RNA genes not only fold into similar final RNA structures, but that their folding pathways also share common transient structural features that have been evolutionarily conserved.

COFOLD: an RNA secondary structure prediction method that takes co-transcriptional folding into account.

Existing state-of-the-art methods that take a single RNA sequence and predict the corresponding RNA secondary structure are thermodynamic methods. These aim to predict the most stable RNA structure. There exists by now ample experimental and theoretical evidence that the process of structure formation matters and that sequences in vivo fold while they are being transcribed.

R-CHIE: a web server and R package for visualizing RNA secondary structures.

Visually examining RNA structures can greatly aid in understanding their potential functional roles and in evaluating the performance of structure prediction algorithms. As many functional roles of RNA structures can already be studied given the secondary structure of the RNA, various methods have been devised for visualizing RNA secondary structures. Most of these methods depict a given RNA secondary structure as a planar graph consisting of base-paired stems interconnected by roundish loops.