4 research outputs found
Ion-mediated RNA structural collapse: effect of spatial confinement
RNAs are negatively charged molecules residing in macromolecular crowding
cellular environments. Macromolecular confinement can influence the ion effects
in RNA folding. In this work, using the recently developed tightly bound ion
model for ion fluctuation and correlation, we investigate the confinement
effect on the ion-mediated RNA structural collapse for a simple model system.
We found that, for both Na and Mg, ion efficiencies in mediating
structural collapse/folding are significantly enhanced by the structural
confinement. Such an enhancement in the ion efficiency is attributed to the
decreased electrostatic free energy difference between the compact conformation
ensemble and the (restricted) extended conformation ensemble due to the spatial
restriction.Comment: 22 pages, 5 figure