Glass transition in secondary structures formed by random RNA sequences

Abstract

Formation of RNA secondary structures is an example of the sequence-structure problem omnipresent in biopolymers. A theoretical question of recent interest is whether a random RNA sequence undergoes a finite temperature glass transition. We answer this question affirmatively by first establishing the perturbative stability of the high temperature phase via a two replica calculation. Subsequently, we show that this phase cannot persist down to zero temperature by considering energetic contributions due to rare regions of complementary subsequences.