Designing Effective small interfering RNA for Post-Transcriptional Silencing of Human GREM1: A Comprehensive Bioinformatics Approach

Asiedu Ebenezer

Thermodynamics of siRNA duplex ends also define gene silencing potential [38] . To evaluate the free energy of the siRNA duplex ends, the Srna algorithm of Sfold server was used to compute the internal stabilities of siRNA for specific target sites (Figure 2) . Physiologically, the dicer binds to the strand with less thermodynamic stability at the 5' end, usually the antisense strand [22, 38] . According to [22] , the free energy of the antisense strand of effective siRNA should not exceed -10kcal/mol. The free energy of antisense strands for the selected siRNAs in . CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license author/funder. It is made available under a The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not peer-reviewed) is the . https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.01.23.917559 doi: bioRxiv preprint this study ranged from ≈-7.5kcal/mol to ≈-9kcal/mol. This agrees with reports that effective siRNAs are thermodynamically less stable at antisense 5'end.