SURVEYING AND CLASSIFYING NUCLEIC ACID STRUCTURES. Anke Gelbin, Les Clowney, Shu-Hsin Hsieh, Christine Zardecki, John Westbrook and Helen M. Berman, Department of Chemistry, Rutgers University, Piscataway NJ 08855

Nucleic acids are highly flexible molecules that can assume a wide variety of shapes. A major challenge is to be able to relate the sequence and experimental conditions to the conformations. There are now over 400 structures of nucleic acid-containing crystals stored in the Nucleic Acid Database archive. The variety of ways in which these molecules can be classified yield different types of information that can be used to help relate the structures to their sequences and other properties. The tools that have been developed for classification and analysis, as well as some structure survey results, will be presented.

Support for this work has been provided by the NSF BIR 9510703.