Table 2.

Common experimental techniques used to study RNA structure and folding.

Method	Perturbation	What is Probed	References
Low Resolution Methods
Small angle X-ray scattering	in vitro	Overall structure	(Yang, 2014) (Pollack, 2011)
Optical melting	in vitro	Thermodynamics/Thermostability	(Schroeder & Turner, 2009)
Stopped-flow, Hand mixing	in vitro	Kinetics
Temperature-jump	in vitro and in vivo	Folding Kinetics/Thermodynamics	(Dyer & Brauns, 2009, Gao et al., 2016)
Single molecule FRET	in vitro	Overall Structure	(Klostermeier & Millar, 2001; Roy et al., 2008)
Hydroxyl radical footprinting	in vitro and in vivo	Structure context of nucleotides
Enzymatic mapping	in vitro	Structure context of nucleotides	(Wan et al., 2011; Clatterbuck Soper, S. F. et al., 2013)
Chemical mapping	in vitro and in vivo	Structure context of nucleotides	(Kwok et al., 2015; Weeks, 2010)
High Resolution Methods
X-ray crystallography	in vitro	Å-Resolution Structure	(Reyes et al., 2009)
Nuclear magnetic resonance	in vitro	Å-Resolution Structure