UC BERKELEYIgnacio (Nacho) Tinoco, a chemist at the University of California, Berkeley, who pioneered methods to understand the structures of RNA, died last month (November 15). He was 85.

Tinoco received his PhD from the University of Wisconsin in 1954, then did a post-doc at Yale University before joining the faculty of Berkeley in 1956.

Tinoco made fundamental contributions to understand RNA folding throughout his more than 60 years at Berkeley. In the early 1970s, Tinoco and his colleagues published a pair of papers describing methods to predict the structure of an RNA molecule from its sequence. “To predict a secondary structure we simply calculated stabilities for possible structures and looked for the maximum,” Tinoco wrote in the Annual Review of Physical Chemistry in 2002. “In spite of the stability numbers, our method was an improvement over previous methods that only maximized numbers of base pairs.”

Although those two...