In collaboration with Cristian Micheletti, we tested the applicability of elastic network models to RNA, using as a benchmark molecular dynamics. Results are very encouraging, showing these fast and simple models can reproduce well the fluctuations as obtained from long and expensive simulations. Interestingly, the we also observe that the flexibility at the nucleotide level correlates with SHAPE reactivity.
The work has been just accepted for publication on Nucleic Acids Research. A preprint is available on arXiv.