| Abstract: | We present absorption and circular dichroism (CD) spectra for the synthetic polymers poly d(AAT):d(AAT) and poly r(AAU):r(AAU), in both native and heat-denatured forms. As a means of evaluating the first-neighbor hypothesis, the CD spectra are compared with approximations derived from spectra of other synthetic polymers containing the same first-neighbor sequences. This is the first instance where such a comparison has been possible using spectra of double-stranded RNA sequences, and the agreement between the measured and approximated spectra for poly r(AAU):r(AUU) is surprisingly good. We have also subjected the CD spectrum of poly d(AAT):d(AAT) to a previously published analytical procedure for obtaining estimates of first-neighbor frequencies. In this first independent test of the procedure, we find that the analysis does infer the existence of a majority (86%) of AA, TT, AT, and TA first neighbors but does not precisely indicate their relative proportions. |
