Validation and Determination of nucleic acid structures from NMR 13C chemical shifts.

ICAZATTI, A.A.; MARTÍN OSVALDO A.; VILA, J.A.

Congreso; VI Argentinian conference on Bioinformatics and Computational Biology.; 2015

Asociación Argentina de Bioinformática y Biología Computacional

Nucleic acids are central molecules for the storing, flow and regulation of genetic and epigenetic information. The recent discovery of the large variety of non-coding functions of RNA molecules has renewed the interest in understanding their structural properties as well as the relationship between these structures and their function. However, there is limited experimental knowledge of the structures of large RNA and DNA molecules. The purposes of this research are: (1) to develop computational methods to determine and validate the three dimensional structure of nucleic acids based on nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) 13C chemical shifts, and (2) to build a bioinformatics application to render these methods easily accessible to the scientific community.In this exploratory component of the work we will theoretically compute 13C chemical shifts from the 8 nucleotides that form RNA and DNA.