The molecular dynamics of nucleosides and nucleotides

Abstract

The relaxation behaviour of various nucleosides and nucleotides derived from uridine and cytidine has been investigated by the ‘magnetization modes’ formalism. The time evolution of the magnetization is measured via inversion recovery experiments. The diffusion constants as well as the random fields are fitted to the experiments by means of a least-squares procedure. All nucleosides and nucleotides are found to have similar rotation diffusion constants for their ribose units, whereas the rotation diffusion constants for the base units differ. The difference is attributed to a significant internal-jump mobility of the base units in the uridine derivatives. To corroborate the fitted values a cross-check with other relaxation-time measurements has been employed.