ISSN:
0006-3525
Keywords:
Chemistry
;
Polymer and Materials Science
Source:
Wiley InterScience Backfile Collection 1832-2000
Topics:
Chemistry and Pharmacology
Notes:
The conformation and packing scheme for guanosine-3′, 5′-cytidine monophosphate, GpC, were computed by minimizing the classical potential energy. The lowest energy conformation of the isolated molecule had dihedral angles in the range of helical RNA's and the sugar pucker was C3′ endo. This was used as the starting conformation in a packing search over orientation space, the dihedral angles being flexible in this step also. The packing search was restricted by constraints from our x-ray data, namely, (1) the dimensions of the monoclinic unit cell and its pseudo-C2 symmetry (the real space group is P21), (2) the location of the phosphorous atom, and (3) the orientation of the bases. In addition, a geometric function was devised to impose Watson-Crick base pairing. Thus, a trial structure could be sought without explicit inclusion of intermolecular potentials. An interactive computer graphics system was used for visualizing the calculated structures.The packing searches yielded two lowest energy schemes in which the molecules had the same conformation (similar to double-helical RNA) but different orientations within the unit cell. One of these was refined by standard x-ray methods to a discrepancy index of 14.4% in the C2 pseudocell. This served as the starting structure for the subsequent refinement in the real P21 cell.5
Additional Material:
8 Ill.
Type of Medium:
Electronic Resource
URL:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/bip.1973.360121208
