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Glass transition in secondary structures formed by random RNA sequences

R. Bundschuh·T. Hwa
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Abstract

Formation of RNA secondary structures is an example of the sequence-structure problem omnipresent in biopolymers. A theoretical question of recent interest is whether a random RNA sequence undergoes a finite temperature glass transition. We answer this question affirmatively by first establishing the perturbative stability of the high temperature phase via a two replica calculation. Subsequently, we show that this phase cannot persist down to zero temperature by considering energetic contributions due to rare regions of complementary subsequences.

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R. Bundschuh, T. Hwa. 2001-06-04. Glass transition in secondary structures formed by random RNA sequences. https://arxiv.org/abs/cond-mat/0106029

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