title: A molecular dynamics study of a miRNA:mRNA interaction.
abstract: In this paper we present a methodology to evaluate the binding free energy of a miRNA:mRNA complex through molecular dynamics (MD)-thermodynamic integration (TI) simulations. We applied our method to the Caenorhabditis elegans let-7 miRNA:lin-41 mRNA complex-a validated miRNA:mRNA interaction-in order to estimate the energetic stability of the structure. To make the miRNA:mRNA simulation possible and realistic, the methodology introduces specific solutions to overcome some of the general challenges of nucleic acid simulations and binding free energy computations that have been discussed widely in many previous research reports. The main features of the proposed methodology are: (1) positioning of the restraints imposed on the simulations in order to guarantee complex stability; (2) optimal sampling of the phase space to achieve satisfactory accuracy in the binding energy value; (3) determination of a suitable trade-off between computational costs and accuracy of binding free energy computation by the assessment of the scalability characteristics of the parallel simulations required for the TI. The experiments carried out demonstrate that MD simulations are a viable strategy for the study of miRNA binding characteristics, opening the way to the development of new computational target prediction methods based on three-dimensional structure information.
authors.affiliation: Department of Control and Computer Engineering, Politecnico di Torino, C.so Duca degli Abruzzi 24, 10129 Turin, Italy. giulia.paciello@polito.it
authors.forename: Giulia
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Paciello
authors.forename: Andrea
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Acquaviva
authors.forename: Elisa
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Ficarra
authors.forename: Marco Agostino
authors.initials: MA
authors.lastname: Deriu
authors.forename: Enrico
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Macii
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D001483:Base Sequence; D017173:Caenorhabditis elegans / Q000235:genetics; D035683:MicroRNAs / Q000737:chemistry*; D056004:Molecular Dynamics Simulation; D009690:Nucleic Acid Conformation; D012333:RNA, Messenger / Q000737:chemistry*; D013816:Thermodynamics
chemical_list: D035683:MicroRNAs; D012333:RNA, Messenger