NuCDB: A databank of nucleic acids circular dichroism spectra

Abstract

Nucleic acids take a variety of secondary structures depending on the sequence and environmental conditions. Circular dichroism (CD) spectroscopy quickly provides the secondary structural information of nucleic acids. Nucleic acid Circular-dichroism DataBank (NuCDB) https://project.iith.ac.in/nucdb/, a repository of nucleic acid secondary structure CD spectra published during 1964-2012, is created. Besides acting as the repository for the nucleic acids CD spectra, NuCDB also has the facility to upload recently published CD spectra to keep the repository up-to-date. This repository provides the sequence-structure-environmental relationship of different nucleic acid fragments in one platform. Until today, CD is used for studying the secondary structure of smaller nucleic acid fragments. Since different parts of the genome and transcriptome of an organism have combinations of various secondary structures and play a crucial role in regulating the biological processes, the CD spectra of longer nucleic acid sequences would be more realistic. Thus, this bioinformatics repository would be helpful in training machine learning models to predict the presence of multiple secondary structures in a given CD spectra.