Translational and rotational diffusion of short ribonucleic acids

Abstract

Inevitable precondition for ribonucleic acids to regulate gene expression and to perform gene editing is diffusion. Free three-dimensional translational diffusion velocity of RNA of up to 200 nucleotides could be predicted with high accuracy by the empirical model D = 4.58 10−10 N−0.39 m2s−1. Furthermore, the biological function of ribonucleic acids is determined by rotational diffusion. In the presented work, an empirical model is derived applying atom-level shell-modeling of electron density maps, Dr = 1.62 109 N−1.20 s−1, to predict the rotational diffusion coefficient of short ribonucleic acids based on the polymer size.