RNA secondary structure formation: a solvable model of heteropolymer folding

Abstract

The statistical mechanics of heteropolymer structure formation is studied in the context of RNA secondary structures. A designed RNA sequence biased energetically towards a particular native structure (a hairpin) is used to study the transition between the native and molten phase of the RNA as a function of temperature. The transition is driven by a competition between the energy gained from the polymer's overlap with the native structure and the entropic gain of forming random contacts. A simplified Go-like model is proposed and solved exactly. The predicted critical behavior is verified via exact numerical enumeration of a large ensemble of similarly designed sequences.

4 pages including 2 figures

References in corpus (2)

• Similarity-Detection and Localization
• Protein folding, anisotropic collapse and blue phases

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