Nucleic acid secondary structure
Nucleic acid secondary structure is the
In a non-biological context, secondary structure is a vital consideration in the nucleic acid design of nucleic acid structures for DNA nanotechnology and DNA computing, since the pattern of basepairing ultimately determines the overall structure of the molecules.
Fundamental concepts
Base pairing
In
The larger nucleobases, adenine and guanine, are members of a class of doubly ringed chemical structures called purines; the smaller nucleobases, cytosine and thymine (and uracil), are members of a class of singly ringed chemical structures called pyrimidines. Purines are only complementary with pyrimidines: pyrimidine-pyrimidine pairings are energetically unfavorable because the molecules are too far apart for hydrogen bonding to be established; purine-purine pairings are energetically unfavorable because the molecules are too close, leading to overlap repulsion. The only other possible pairings are GT and AC; these pairings are mismatches because the pattern of hydrogen donors and acceptors do not correspond. The GU wobble base pair, with two hydrogen bonds, does occur fairly often in RNA.
Nucleic acid hybridization
Hybridization is the process of
Strand separation by gentle heating, as used in PCR, is simple providing the molecules have fewer than about 10,000 base pairs (10 kilobase pairs, or 10 kbp). The intertwining of the DNA strands makes long segments difficult to separate. The cell avoids this problem by allowing its DNA-melting enzymes (helicases) to work concurrently with topoisomerases, which can chemically cleave the phosphate backbone of one of the strands so that it can swivel around the other. Helicases unwind the strands to facilitate the advance of sequence-reading enzymes such as DNA polymerase.
Secondary structure motifs
Nucleic acid secondary structure is generally divided into helices (contiguous base pairs), and various kinds of loops (unpaired nucleotides surrounded by helices). Frequently these elements, or combinations of them, are further classified into additional categories including, for example, tetraloops, pseudoknots, and stem-loops. Topological approaches can be used to categorize and compare complex structures that arise from combining these elements in various arrangements.
Double helix
The double helix is an important tertiary structure in nucleic acid molecules which is intimately connected with the molecule's secondary structure. A double helix is formed by regions of many consecutive base pairs.
The nucleic acid double helix is a spiral polymer, usually right-handed, containing two
Stem-loop structures
The secondary structure of nucleic acid molecules can often be uniquely decomposed into stems and loops. The stem-loop structure (also often referred to as an "hairpin"), in which a base-paired helix ends in a short unpaired loop, is extremely common and is a building block for larger structural motifs such as cloverleaf structures, which are four-helix junctions such as those found in transfer RNA. Internal loops (a short series of unpaired bases in a longer paired helix) and bulges (regions in which one strand of a helix has "extra" inserted bases with no counterparts in the opposite strand) are also frequent.
There are many secondary structure elements of functional importance to biological RNAs; some famous examples are the Rho-independent terminator stem-loops and the tRNA cloverleaf. Active research is on-going to determine the secondary structure of RNA molecules, with approaches including both experimental and computational methods (see also the List of RNA structure prediction software).
Pseudoknots
A pseudoknot is a nucleic acid secondary structure containing at least two stem-loop structures in which half of one stem is intercalated between the two halves of another stem. Pseudoknots fold into knot-shaped three-dimensional conformations but are not true topological knots. The base pairing in pseudoknots is not well nested; that is, base pairs occur that "overlap" one another in sequence position. This makes the presence of general pseudoknots in nucleic acid sequences impossible to predict by the standard method of dynamic programming, which uses a recursive scoring system to identify paired stems and consequently cannot detect non-nested base pairs with common algorithms. However, limited subclasses of pseudoknots can be predicted using modified dynamic programs.[8] Newer structure prediction techniques such as
Pseudoknots can form a variety of structures with catalytic activity[9] and several important biological processes rely on RNA molecules that form pseudoknots. For example, the RNA component of the human telomerase contains a pseudoknot that is critical for its activity.[7] The hepatitis delta virus ribozyme is a well known example of a catalytic RNA with a pseudoknot in its active site.[10][11] Though DNA can also form pseudoknots, they are generally not present in standard physiological conditions.
Secondary structure prediction
Most methods for nucleic acid secondary structure prediction rely on a nearest neighbor thermodynamic model.
For many RNA molecules, the secondary structure is highly important to the correct function of the RNA — often more so than the actual sequence. This fact aids in the analysis of
RNA secondary structure applies in
Secondary structure determination
RNA secondary structure can be determined from atomic coordinates (tertiary structure) obtained by X-ray crystallography, often deposited in the Protein Data Bank. Current methods include 3DNA/DSSR[16] and MC-annotate.[17]
See also
- DNA nanotechnology
- Molecular models of DNA
- DiProDB. The database is designed to collect and analyse thermodynamic, structural and other dinucleotide properties.
- RNA CoSSMos
References
- PMID 14990744.
- PMID 16449200.
- PMID 3459152.
- ^ Richard Owczarzy (2008-08-28). "DNA melting temperature - How to calculate it?". High-throughput DNA biophysics. owczarzy.net. Archived from the original on 2015-04-30. Retrieved 2008-10-02.
- ISBN 978-0-8153-4105-5.
- PMID 6236744.
- ^ PMID 15849264.
- S2CID 2228845.
- PMID 15941360.
- S2CID 4359811.
- PMID 7574482.
- PMID 9778347.
- PMID 15123812.
- PMID 2468181.
- PMID 26566657.
- PMID 26184874.
- ^ "MC-Annotate". www-lbit.iro.umontreal.ca.
External links
- MDDNA: Structural Bioinformatics of DNA
- Abalone — Commercial software for DNA modeling
- DNAlive: a web interface to compute DNA physical properties. Also allows cross-linking of the results with the UCSC Genome browser and DNA dynamics.