Coarse-Grained Modeling of Nucleic Acids Using Anisotropic Gay-Berne and Electric Multipole Potentials

In this work, we attempt to apply a coarse-grained (CG) model, which is based on anisotropic Gay-Berne and electric multipole (EMP) potentials, to the modeling of nucleic acids. First, a comparison has been made between the CG and atomistic models (AMBER point-charge model) in the modeling of DNA and RNA hairpin structures. The CG results have demonstrated a good quality in maintaining the nucleic acid hairpin structures, in reproducing the dynamics of backbone atoms of nucleic acids, and in describing the hydrogen-bonding interactions between nucleic acid base pairs. Second, the CG and atomistic AMBER models yield comparable results in modeling double-stranded DNA and RNA molecules. It is encouraging that our CG model is capable of reproducing many elastic features of nucleic acid base pairs in terms of the distributions of the interbase pair step parameters (such as shift, slide, tilt, and twist) and the intrabase pair parameters (such as buckle, propeller, shear, and stretch). Finally, The GBEMP model has shown a promising ability to predict the melting temperatures of DNA duplexes with different lengths.