Impact of loop statistics on the thermodynamics of RNA folding

Abstract

Loops are abundant in native RNA structures and proliferate close to the unfolding transition. By including a statistical weight ~ l^{-c} for loops of length l in the recursion relation for the partition function, we show that the calculated heat capacity depends sensitively on the presence and value of the exponent c, even of short t-RNA. For homo-RNA we analytically calculate the critical temperature and critical exponents which exhibit a non-universal dependence on c.

arXiv comment4 pages, 3 figures, including supplementary information

References in corpus (8)

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• Coupled dynamics of RNA folding and nanopore translocation
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• RNA matrix models with external interactions and their asymptotic behaviour
• A three-state model with loop entropy for the over-stretching transition of DNA
• Cold denaturation of RNA secondary structures with loop entropy and quenched disorder
• Distribution of graph-distances in Boltzmann ensembles of RNA secondary structures