THEORETICAL-STUDY OF THE DEPENDENCE OF THE FOLDING RATE ON CHAIN-LENGTH FOR RNA-LIKE HETEROPOLYMERS

Modeling the kinetics of searching for the native secondary structure of RNA by the Monte Carlo method, we found the dependence of the chara cteristic first passage time to the energy minimum on the chain length . The results obtained are best approximated by the dependence t = AL( b), where t is the time of attaining the energy minimum expressed as t he: number of Monte Carlo steps, L is the chain length, and A and b ar e constants. Such dependences were derived for both ''random'' sequenc es (for which b exceeds 5) and those specially edited to stabilize the energy minimum (for such sequences, b is smaller than 3).