Aims

• To introduce bioinformatics challenges in analysing and predicting the three-dimensional structures of RNA molecules.

Objectives

After this lecture you will:

• be aware of computational approaches to modelling the three-dimensional structures of RNA molecules.

Supplementary Material

Some approaches to building three-dimensional RNA structures are described in:

Major, F. (2003) Building three-dimensional ribonucleic acid structures. Computing in Science and Engineering, 5, 44-53. (IEEE Xplore)

Several recent papers describe RNA structure analysis, including studies of base pair geometries:

Leontis, N.B. and Westhof, E. (2001) Geometric nomenclature and classification of RNA base pairs. RNA, 7, 499-512. (PubMed)

and backbone conformation:

Murray, L.J., Arendall, W.B. 3rd, Richardson, D.C. and Richardson J.S. (2003) RNA backbone is rotameric. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A, 100, 13904-13909. (PubMed)