Abstract
Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy has been widely used for the analysis of both protein and nucleic acid secondary structure. This is one of the vibration spectroscopy methods that are extremely sensitive to any change in molecular structure. While numerous reports describe how to proceed to analyze protein and deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) structures using FTIR, reports related to the analyses of ribonucleic acids (RNAs) are few. Nevertheless, RNAs are versatile molecules involved in a multitude of roles in the cell. In this chapter, we present applications of FTIR for the structural analysis of RNA, including the analysis of helical parameters and noncanonical base pairing, often found in RNA. The effect of temperature pretreatment, which has a great impact on RNA folding, will also be discussed.
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Abbreviations
- ATR:
-
Attenuated total reflectance
- FTIR:
-
Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy
- nt:
-
Nucleotide
- ss-/dsRNA:
-
Single/double-stranded RNA
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Acknowledgments
This work was supported by the CNRS, CEA, University Paris Diderot, University Paris 13, and University of Palermo. We are grateful to RR Sinden (South Dakota School of Mines and Technology, USA) for critical reading of the manuscript and many fruitful comments.
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Geinguenaud, F., Militello, V., Arluison, V. (2020). Application of FTIR Spectroscopy to Analyze RNA Structure. In: Arluison, V., Wien, F. (eds) RNA Spectroscopy. Methods in Molecular Biology, vol 2113. Humana, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-0716-0278-2_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-0716-0278-2_10
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