RNA plays a dual role as an informational molecule and a direct effector of biological tasks. The latter function is enabled by RNA’s ability to adopt complex secondary and tertiary folds and thus has motivated extensive computational1–2 and experimental3–8 efforts for determining RNA structures. Existing approaches for evaluating RNA structure have been largely limited to in vitro systems, yet the thermodynamic forces which drive RNA folding in vitro may not be sufficient to predict stable RNA structures in vivo5. Indeed, the presence of RNA binding proteins and ATP-dependent helicases can influence which structures are present inside cells. Here we present an approach for globally monitoring RNA structure in native conditions in vivo with single nucleotide precision. This method is based on in vivo modification with dimethyl sulfate (DMS), which reacts with unpaired adenine and cytosine residues9, followed by deep sequencing to monitor modifications. Our data from yeast and mammalian cells are in excellent agreement with known mRNA structures and with the high-resolution crystal structure of the Saccharomyces cerevisiae ribosome10. Comparison between in vivo and in vitro data reveals that in rapidly dividing cells there are vastly fewer structured mRNA regions in vivo than in vitro. Even thermostable RNA structures are often denatured in cells, highlighting the importance of cellular processes in regulating RNA structure. Indeed, analysis of mRNA structure under ATP-depleted conditions in yeast reveals that energy-dependent processes strongly contribute to the predominantly unfolded state of mRNAs inside cells. Our studies broadly enable the functional analysis of physiological RNA structures and reveal that, in contrast to the Anfinsen view of protein folding, thermodynamics play an incomplete role in determining mRNA structure in vivo.

Coupling structure-specific in vivo chemical modification to next-generation sequencing is transforming RNA secondary structural studies in living cells. The dominant strategy for detecting in vivo chemical modifications uses reverse transcriptase truncation products, which introduces biases and necessitates population-average assessments of RNA structure. Here we present dimethyl sulfate mutational profiling with sequencing (DMS-MaPseq), which encodes DMS modifications as mismatches using a thermostable group II intron reverse transcriptase (TGIRT). DMS-MaPseq yields a high signal-to-noise ratio, can report multiple structural features per molecule, and allows both genome-wide studies and focused in vivo investigations of even low abundance RNAs. We apply DMS-MaPseq for the first analysis of RNA structure within an animal tissue and to identify a functional structure involved in non-canonical translation initiation. Additionally, we use DMS-MaPseq to compare the in vivo structure of pre-mRNAs to their mature isoforms. These applications illustrate DMS-MaPseq’s capacity to dramatically expand in vivo analysis of RNA structure.