Interplay between single-stranded binding proteins on RNA secondary structure

Abstract

RNA-protein interactions control the fate of cellular RNAs and play an important role in gene regulation. An interdependency between such interactions allows for the implementation of logic functions in gene regulation. We investigate the interplay between RNA-binding partners in the context of the statistical physics of RNA secondary structure and define a linear correlation function between the two partners as a measurement of the interdependency of their binding events. We demonstrate the emergence of a long-range power-law behavior of this linear correlation function. This suggests RNA secondary structure driven interdependency between binding sites as a general mechanism for combinatorial post-transcriptional gene regulation.