Expérimental
Magnetic tweezers are a tool enabling real-time monitoring of nucleic acid extension on a single-molecule scale, at several hundred Hz. They are perfectly suited for tracking the temporal evolution between different molecular conformations of nucleic acids and measuring their energy differences as we already demonstrated. What's more, by imposing a tensile force on the molecules studied, it is possible to modify the energy profile and bring out minority conformations, i.e., those of higher energy. The proposed project will first study of the influence of methylation on RNA conformational flexibility at the single molecule level with magnetic tweezers. After the quantification of the conformational energy profile of the RNA, the influence of RNA methylation on protein binding on the sequence used will be investigated.