Analysis of the conformational energy landscape of human snRNA with a metric based on tree representation of RNA structures

It is an outstanding problem to clarify how the RNA sequence is related to its structure and biological functions. We developed a simplified definition of a metric for tree representation of RNA secondary structures and analyzed the conformational energy landscapes of human spliceosomal snRNAs. We discuss the structural properties of the biological sequence by calculating the conformational energy landscapes based on the structural distance between each of the pairs in the set of suboptimal structures. The new index value is introduced for estimating the shapes of distribution patterns in conformational energy landscapes. We apply our method to the five human snRNAs and show that U1 snRNA has a multi-valley profile of the landscape, whereas the landscapes of the other four snRNAs have one steep valley. This result reflects different biological functions of these snRNAs in the pre-mRNA splicing process. The results of analyzing tRNAs and rRNAs show that the conformational energy landscapes of these sequences have multi-valley profiles.