Techniques for modeling and analyzing RNA and protein folding energy landscapes
Abstract
RNA and protein molecules undergo a dynamic folding process that is important
to their function. Computational methods are critical for studying this folding pro-
cess because it is difficult to observe experimentally. In this work, we introduce
new computational techniques to study RNA and protein energy landscapes, includ-
ing a method to approximate an RNA energy landscape with a coarse graph (map)
and new tools for analyzing graph-based approximations of RNA and protein energy
landscapes. These analysis techniques can be used to study RNA and protein fold-
ing kinetics such as population kinetics, folding rates, and the folding of particular
subsequences. In particular, a map-based Master Equation (MME) method can be
used to analyze the population kinetics of the maps, while another map analysis tool,
map-based Monte Carlo (MMC) simulation, can extract stochastic folding pathways
from the map.
To validate the results, I compared our methods with other computational meth-
ods and with experimental studies of RNA and protein. I first compared our MMC
and MME methods for RNA with other computational methods working on the com-
plete energy landscape and show that the approximate map captures the major fea-
tures of a much larger (e.g., by orders of magnitude) complete energy landscape.
Moreover, I show that the methods scale well to large molecules, e.g., RNA with 200+ nucleotides. Then, I correlate the computational results with experimental
findings. I present comparisons with two experimental cases to show how I can pre-
dict kinetics-based functional rates of ColE1 RNAII and MS2 phage RNA and their
mutants using our MME and MMC tools respectively. I also show that the MME
and MMC tools can be applied to map-based approximations of protein energy energy
landscapes and present kinetics analysis results for several proteins.
Citation
Tang, Xinyu (2007). Techniques for modeling and analyzing RNA and protein folding energy landscapes. Doctoral dissertation, Texas A&M University. Available electronically from https : / /hdl .handle .net /1969 .1 /ETD -TAMU -2464.