The change in structure is measured by calculating the root mean square deviation from the backbone atomal position of the favored structure.
2.
For this reason, describing data sets via their standard deviation or root mean square deviation is often preferred over using the variance.
3.
The structure of the nucleosome core particle is remarkably conserved, and even a change of over 100 residues between frog and yeast histones results in electron density maps with an overall root mean square deviation of only 1.6?