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- Nucleic acid NMR is the use of nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy to obtain information about the structure and dynamics of nucleic acid molecules, such as DNA or RNA. It is useful for molecules of up to 100 nucleotides, and as of 2003, nearly half of all known RNA structures had been determined by NMR spectroscopy. NMR has advantages over X-ray crystallography, which is the other method for high-resolution nucleic acid structure determination, in that the molecules are being observed in their natural solution state rather than in a crystal lattice that may affect the molecule's structural properties. It is also possible to investigate dynamics with NMR. This comes at the cost of slightly less accurate and detailed structures than crystallography. Nucleic acid NMR uses techniques similar to those of protein NMR, but has several differences. Nucleic acids have a smaller percentage of hydrogen atoms, which are the atoms usually observed in NMR, and because nucleic acid double helices are stiff and roughly linear, they do not fold back on themselves to give "long-range" correlations. Nucleic acids also tend to have resonances distributed over a smaller range than proteins, making the spectra potentially more crowded and difficult to interpret. (en)
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