Chirality errors in nucleic acid structures

Abstract

The prevalence of errors as opposed to true anomalies in protein structures was discussed in Correspondence last year¹. We have analysed the nucleic acid structures in the Brookhaven Protein Data Bank using a simple automatic procedure (program available at http://www.mbi.ucla.edu/people/peter/chiral.html) to determine the configurations at tetrahedral chiral centres. It appears that a number of structures containing significant “chirality errors that no-one would argue with”² have made their way into the data bank.