A series of coarse-grained models have been developed for the study of the
molecular dynamics of RNA nanostructures. The models in the series have one to
three beads per nucleotide and include different amounts of detailed structural
information. Such a treatment allows us to reach, for the systems of thousands
of nucleotides, a time scale of microseconds (i.e. by three orders of magnitude
longer than in the full atomistic modelling) and thus to enable simulations of
large RNA polymers in the context of bionanotechnology. We find that the
3-beads-per-nucleotide models, described by a set of just a few universal
parameters, are able to describe different RNA conformations and are comparable
in structural precision to the models where detailed values of the backbone
P-C4' dihedrals taken from a reference structure are included. These findings
are discussed in the context of the RNA conformation classes
