Human telomerase reverse transcriptase binds to a pre-organized hTR in vivo exposing its template.

Telomerase is a specialized reverse transcriptase that is responsible for telomere length maintenance. As in other organisms, the minimal components required for an active human telomerase are the template-providing telomerase RNA (hTR) and the enzymatic entity telomerase reverse transcriptase (hTERT). Here, we explored the structure of hTR and the hTERT-induced conformational changes within hTR in living cells.

Mapping RNA structure in vitro using nucleobase-specific probes.

RNAs have to adopt specific three-dimensional structures to fulfill their biological functions. Therefore exploring RNA structure is of interest to understand RNA-dependent processes. Chemical probing in vitro is a very powerful tool to investigate RNA molecules under a variety of conditions.