title: A quantitative measure of chirality inside nucleic acid databank.
abstract: We show the capability of a chirality index (Pietropaolo et al., Proteins 2008;70:667-677) to investigate nucleic acid structures because of its high sensitivity to helical conformations. By analyzing selected structures of DNA and RNA, we have found that sequences rich in cytosine and guanine have a tendency to left-handed chirality, in contrast to regions rich in adenine or thymine which show strong negative, right-handed, chirality values. We also analyze RNA structures, where specific loops and hairpin motifs are characterized by a well-defined chirality value. We find that in nucleosome the chirality is exalted, whereas in ribosome it is reduced. Our results illustrate the sensitivity of this descriptor for nucleic acid conformations.
authors: Computational Science, Department of Chemistry and Applied Biosciences, ETH Zürich, USI Campus, Lugano, Switzerland. adriana.pietropaolo@phys.chem.ethz.ch
authors: Adriana
authors: A
authors: Pietropaolo
authors: Michele
authors: M
authors: Parrinello