title: Accurate curve fitting procedure for UV melting analysis of highly thermostable RNA hairpins.
abstract: Thermostable RNA hairpins with specific loop sequences are critically important structural elements for proper folding of functional RNAs. Thermodynamic parameters of the structural elements are indispensable for secondary structure prediction. However when RNA folds into highly thermostable hairpin-loop structures, it is difficult to determine the melting temperature and other thermodynamic parameters from the normal UV melting analysis. In this study, we demonstrate a procedure to solve the problem using our software, Jfit. UV absorbance in the higher temperature region above 95 degrees C and the upper baseline were estimated using this analytical procedure. The ideal lines of -RlnK vs. 1/T were generated from the predicted thermodynamic parameters and the solution candidates were compared with the van't Hoff plot generated from the measured melting curve to judge their self-consistency. As a result, our analysis was able to reduce the number of the possible solution and to specify the best set of thermodynamic parameters for the stable hairpin formation.
authors.affiliation: Department of Nanobiochemistry, FIRST, Konan University and Frontier Institute for Biomolecular Engineering Research, Konan University, Kobe 650-0047, Japan. kawakami@konan-u.ac.jp
authors.forename: Junji
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Kawakami
authors.forename: Yuko
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Tanaka
authors.forename: Kae
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Kishimoto
mesh_terms: D009690:Nucleic Acid Conformation; D009691:Nucleic Acid Denaturation; D012313:RNA / Q000737:chemistry*; D020871:RNA Stability; D012984:Software; D013056:Spectrophotometry, Ultraviolet; D013816:Thermodynamics
chemical_list: D012313:RNA