| Abstract
| - We report molecular dynamics simulations of the equilibrium folding/unfolding thermodynamics of the RNA tetraloop in explicit solvent. A replica exchange molecular dynamics study of the r(CGUUGCCG) oligomer that forms a hairpin is performed for 226 ns per replica, using 52 replicas. We are able to show the unbiased folding of all replicas starting from extended conformations. The equilibrium pressure−temperature free energy of folding, ΔG(P,T), is calculated from the averaged energy, pressure, and specific volume change upon folding of the oligomer as a function of T at constant volume. We find that this oligomer is destabilized by increasing hydrostatic pressure, similar to the behavior of globular proteins.
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