Nucleic-acid structural deformability deduced from anisotropic displacement parameters.

ABSTRACT: The growing numbers of very well resolved nucleic-acid crystal structures with anisotropic displacement parameters provide an unprecedented opportunity to learn about the natural motions of DNA and RNA. Here we report a new Monte-Carlo approach that takes direct account of this information to extract the distortions of covalent structure, base pairing, and dinucleotide geometry intrinsic to regularly organized double-helical molecules. We present new methods to test the validity of the anisotropic parameters and examine the apparent deformability of a variety of structures, including several A, B, and Z DNA duplexes, an AB helical intermediate, an RNA, a ligand-DNA complex, and an enzyme-bound DNA. The rigid-body parameters characterizing the positions of the bases in the structures mirror

SUBMITTER: Peckham HE 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4163913 | biostudies-literature | 2011 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature