This workshop aims to address major challenges in nucleic acid electrostatics and their folding and functional processes. DNA and RNA - biological macromolecules with central roles in information storage, gene expression and function - are polyelectrolytes. Thus, an understanding of their structural and functional properties requires a conceptual and quantitative accounting of their electrostatic properties.

However, the polyanionic character of nucleic acids results in complex electrostatic interactions with counter ions, including inner and outer sphere metal ions and formation of an ion cloud surrounding DNA and RNA. These complexities are currently poorly understood and are difficult to model. Further, their understanding will require advances in both theory and experiment and, critically, an interplay between them.

This meeting will bring together experimentalists and theorists to explore avenues for working collaboratively in a more focused manner - to share perspectives about the state-of-the-art RNA electrostatics (theory and experiment) and to identify experimental approaches that would be most helpful in testing and addressing key bottlenecks in theory and modeling. A key goal will be to work toward the development of a framework that will allow blind computational predictions to be independently tested via experiment to meet a critical need of this community.