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Impact of loop statistics on the thermodynamics of RNA folding

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 نشر من قبل Thomas R. Einert
 تاريخ النشر 2008
  مجال البحث فيزياء
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 تأليف Thomas R. Einert




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Loops are abundant in native RNA structures and proliferate close to the unfolding transition. By including a statistical weight ~ l^{-c} for loops of length l in the recursion relation for the partition function, we show that the calculated heat capacity depends sensitively on the presence and value of the exponent c, even of short t-RNA. For homo-RNA we analytically calculate the critical temperature and critical exponents which exhibit a non-universal dependence on c.

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