Abstract Regardless of the scale it is built at, geometric principles origami make an architecture both constrained by act folding and imbued with dynamics folding. From space stations to molecules, solutions are inspiring a new type design that considers its deployment as integral part structure. In this essay, I will explain some surprising similarities between ancient art paper RNA at nanosc...

Native polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis is a powerful approach for visualizing RNA folding states and folding intermediates. Tris-borate has a high-buffering capacity and is therefore widely used in electrophoresis-based investigations of RNA structure and folding. However, the effectiveness of Tris-borate as a counterion for RNA has not been systematically investigated. In a recirculated Hep...

Tetraloops with the generic sequence GNRA are commonly found in RNA secondary structure, and interactions of such tetraloops with "receptors" elsewhere in RNA play important roles in RNA structure and folding. However, the contributions of tetraloop-receptor interactions specifically to the kinetics of RNA tertiary folding, rather than the thermodynamics of maintaining tertiary structure once f...

UNLABELLED Three-dimensional RNA structure prediction and folding is of significant interest in the biological research community. Here, we present iFoldRNA, a novel web-based methodology for RNA structure prediction with near atomic resolution accuracy and analysis of RNA folding thermodynamics. iFoldRNA rapidly explores RNA conformations using discrete molecular dynamics simulations of input ...

Barrier trees consisting of local minima and their connecting saddle points imply a natural coarse-graining for the description of the energy landscape of RNA secondary structures. Here we show that, based on this approach, it is possible to predict the folding behavior of RNA molecules by numerical integration. Comparison with stochastic folding simulations shows reasonable agreement of the re...

RNAs are highly charged polyanionic molecules. RNA structure and function are strongly correlated with the ionic condition of the solution. The primary focus of this article is on the role of diffusive ions in RNA folding. Due to the long-range nature of electrostatic interactions, the diffuse ions can contribute significantly to RNA structural stability and folding kinetics. We present an over...

RNA secondary structures with pseudoknots are often predicted by minimizing free energy, which is NP-hard. Most RNAs fold during transcription from DNA into RNA through a hierarchical pathway wherein secondary structures form prior to tertiary structures. Real RNA secondary structures often have local instead of global optimization because of kinetic reasons. The performance of RNA structure pr...

Accurate quantification of the ionic contribution to RNA folding stability could greatly enhance our ability to understand and predict RNA functions. Recently, motivated by the potential importance of ion correlation and fluctuation in RNA folding, we developed the tightly bound ion (TBI) model. Extensive experimental tests showed that the TBI model can lead to better treatment of multivalent i...

It has recently been found that some RNA functions are determined by the actual folding process itself and not just the RNA’s nucleotide sequence or its native structure. In this paper, we present new computational tools that can be used to study kinetics-based functions for RNA such as population kinetics, folding rates, and the folding of particular subsequences. Previously, these properties ...

Many RNA molecules exert their biological function only after folding to unique three-dimensional structures. For long, noncoding RNA molecules, the complexity of finding the native topology can be a major impediment to correct folding to the biologically active structure. An RNA molecule may fold to a near-native structure but not be able to continue to the correct structure due to a topologic...