An understanding of molecular interactions is essential for insight into biological systems at
the molecular scale. Among the various components of molecular interactions, electrostatics …

Dynamic RNA molecules carry out essential processes in the cell including translation and
splicing. Base-pair interactions stabilize RNA into relatively rigid structures, while flexible …

Atomic-scale modeling of compacted nucleic acids has the ability to reveal the inner
workings of spectacular biomolecular machines, yet the outcome of such modeling efforts …

The concept of “ion atmosphere” is prevalent in both theoretical and experimental studies of
nucleic acid systems, yet the spatial arrangement and the composition of ions in the ion …

Recent experiments [Nakata, M. et al., End-to-end stacking and liquid crystal condensation
of 6 to 20 basepair DNA duplexes. Science 2007; 318: 1276–1279] have demonstrated …

Riboswitches are a newly discovered large family of structured functional RNA elements that
specifically bind small molecule targets out of a myriad of cellular metabolites to modulate …

Accurate models of alkali and halide ions in aqueous solution are necessary for computer
simulations of a broad variety of systems. Previous efforts to develop ion force fields have …

Charge hydration asymmetry (CHA) manifests itself in the experimentally observed strong
dependence of free energy of ion hydration on the sign of the ion charge. This asymmetry is …

Coassembled molecular structures are known to exhibit a large variety of geometries and
morphologies. A grand challenge of self-assembly design is to find techniques to control the …

Among noncovalent forces, electrostatic ones are the strongest and possess a rather long-
range action. For these reasons, charges and counterions play a prominent role in self …