ANALYSIS AND SYNTHESIS OF NUCLEIC ACID SECONDARY STRUCTURE

研究在与鲁斯·努西诺夫博士的合作下继续进行

Research has continued in collaboration with Dr. Ruth Nussinov from the School of Medicine at Tel Aviv University in the area of B-DNA distortions based upon the Calladine-Dickerson rules. Two extendable systems have been developed and enhanced which incorporate the four rules of distortion, namely helical twist, base pair roll, and torsion and propeller twist. These systems have the facility to search for patterns that are not known to exist a priori. Feature enhancement and feature detection techniques are available to aid the user in an interactive environmental to discover new patterns of potential interset. These techniques have indicated the existence of morphologic structures which appear to be correlated to functionality within the molecule. Work has also begun on a new algorithm to measure similarity among secondary strucutes of RNA molecules. This technique when perfected should permit the determination of multiple levels of similarity amongst several molecules of the same or different classes. Also, the RNA secondary structure drawing programs has been sent to several more institutions around the world. It is proving to be quite useful in depicting the structures of RNA molecules after they have been folded.