Abstract
DNA structures and their variations are important in several contexts such as chromatin remodeling and transcriptional initiation and regulation etc. Theneed for computational characterization of DNA structures associated with DNA bending/binding, B ? A transitions in protein-DNA complexes, molecular dynamics trajectory analysis and also in the context of strand orientation, especially in DNA triplexes and quadruplexes, have given rise to several fine grained parameters, such as backbone conformations, sugar pucker and ? angle, local strand orientation, base pair and base pair step parameters, backbone base inclination etc. With their unpaired bases, extensive non helical regions, non-canonical base pairs and tertiary interactions, RNA molecules host a large variety of recurrent structural and functional motifs and parameters such as zp, defined in the context of double helical DNA base pairs and base pair steps and effectively used for A and B DNA differentiations, can not be used for computationally driven automated mining of complex RNA motifs. Thus for RNA structures, though several motif mining algorithms based on backbone conformational parameters and involving computational detection and analysis of base pairs and their parameters are available, there are no reports of studies involving parameters which simultaneously involve backbone conformation as well as base pairing geometry. In this work, we propose a novel set of parameters, Omega Torsions and Omega Distances, which captures backbone geometries at base(i) ? base(j) interaction points and which can be used to computationally characterize structural features both in RNA and DNA. Pseudo torsion angles: Omega ?: P(i)-C4'(i)-C4'(j)-P(j); Omega ?: P(i+1)-C4'(i)-C4'(j)-P(j+1) Omega 1: P(i)-C4'(i)-C4'(j)-P(j+1); Omega 2: P(i+1)-C4'(i)-C4'(j)-P(j) Pseudo bond distance: Omega distance: C4'(i)-C4'(j) Where 'i' and 'j' are bases interacting through hydrogen bonds. We report the results of our benchmarking studies of Omega parameters, as applied to protein DNA complexes including e.g. TATA box-TBP complexes and nucleosomal DNA, with standard DNA structure classification parameters, such as zp, and of our preliminary studies on their effectiveness in classifying local geometries of RNA strands in different base pairing contexts. We conclude that omega parameters can potentially lead to the development of a single set of parameters which can be used to characterize both DNA as well as RNA structures.