Sensing the structural and conformational properties of single-stranded nucleic acids using electrometry and molecular simulations.

ABSTRACT: Inferring the 3D structure and conformation of disordered biomolecules, e.g., single stranded nucleic acids (ssNAs), remains challenging due to their conformational heterogeneity in solution. Here, we use escape-time electrometry (ETe) to measure with sub elementary-charge precision the effective electrical charge in solution of short to medium chain length ssNAs in the range of 5-60 bases. We compare measurements of molecular effective charge with theoretically calculated values for simulated molecular conformations obtained from Molecular Dynamics simulations using a variety of forcefield descriptions. We demonstrate that the measured effective charge captures subtle differences in molecular structure in various nucleic acid homopolymers of identical length, and also that the experimenta

SUBMITTER: Walker-Gibbons R 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11375218 | biostudies-literature | 2024 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature