Phys. Rev. Lett. 101, 048103 (2008) [4 pages]Impact of Loop Statistics on the Thermodynamics of RNA FoldingReceived 15 February 2008; published 24 July 2008 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 heat capacity depends sensitively on the presence and value of the exponent c, even for a short explicit tRNA sequence. For long homo-RNA, we analytically calculate the critical temperature and critical exponents which exhibit a nonuniversal dependence on c. © 2008 The American Physical Society URL:
http://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevLett.101.048103
DOI:
10.1103/PhysRevLett.101.048103
PACS:
87.15.A−, 05.70.Fh, 87.14.gn, 87.15.−v
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