Modeling the interplay of single-stranded binding proteins and nucleic acid secondary structure.
BACKGROUND
There are many important proteins which bind single-stranded nucleic acids, such as the nucleocapsid protein in HIV and the RecA DNA repair protein in bacteria. The presence of such proteins can strongly alter the secondary structure of the nucleic acid molecules. Therefore, accurate modeling of the interaction between single-stranded nucleic acids and such proteins is essential to fully understand many biological processes.


RESULTS
We develop a model for predicting nucleic acid secondary structure in the presence of single-stranded binding proteins, and implement it as an extension of the Vienna RNA Package. All parameters needed to model nucleic acid secondary structures in the absence of proteins have been previously determined. This leaves the footprint and sequence-dependent binding affinity of the protein as adjustable parameters of our model. Using this model we are able to predict the probability of the protein binding at any position in the nucleic acid sequence, the impact of the protein on nucleic acid base pairing, the end-to-end distance distribution for the nucleic acid and FRET distributions for fluorophores attached to the nucleic acid.


BACKGROUND
Source code for our modified version of the Vienna RNA package is freely available at http://bioserv.mps.ohio-state.edu/Vienna+P, implemented in C and running on Linux.
Forties
Robert A
RA
Department of Physics, Center for RNA Biology and Department of Biochemistry, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA.
Bundschuh
Ralf
R
D000465:Algorithms; D001665:Binding Sites; D003198:Computer Simulation; D008956:Models, Chemical; D008958:Models, Molecular; D009690:Nucleic Acid Conformation; D009696:Nucleic Acids / Q000737:chemistry*; D011485:Protein Binding; D025941:Protein Interaction Mapping / Q000379:methods*; D011506:Proteins / Q000737:chemistry* / Q000648:ultrastructure*
D009696:Nucleic Acids; D011506:Proteins