title: A secondary and tertiary structure editor for nucleic acids.
abstract: A major difficulty in the evaluation of secondary and tertiary structures of nucleic acids is the lack of convenient methods for their construction and representation. As a first step in a study of the symbolic representation of biopolymers, we report the development of a structure editor written in Pascal, permitting model construction on the screen of a personal computer. The program calculates energies for helical regions, allows user-defined helices and displays the secondary structure of a nucleic acid based on a user-selected set of helices. Screen and printer outputs can be in the form of a backbone or the letters of the primary sequence. The molecule can then be displayed in a format which simulates its three-dimensional structure. Using appropriate glasses, the molecule can be viewed on the screen in three dimensions. Other options include the manipulation of helices and single-stranded regions which results in changes in the spatial relationship between different regions of the molecule. The editor requires an IBM or compatible PC, 640 kbyte memory and a medium or high resolution graphics card.
authors: Départment de Biochimie, Université de Montréal, Québec, Canada.
authors: R
authors: R
authors: Cedergren
authors: D
authors: D
authors: Gautheret
authors: G
authors: G
authors: Lapalme
authors: F
authors: F
authors: Major
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D001483:Base Sequence; D003196:Computer Graphics; D008958:Models, Molecular; D009690:Nucleic Acid Conformation; D012343:RNA, Transfer / Q000235:genetics; D012984:Software; D013816:Thermodynamics
chemical_list: D012343:RNA, Transfer