AI Article Synopsis
- The R3C ligase ribozyme, initially 73 nucleotides long, was modified to reduce its size while maintaining catalytic efficiency.
- By deleting portions of key structural elements (the "grip" and "hammer" regions), researchers identified a minimum size that still allowed ribozyme function similar to the full-length version.
- The study concludes that a minimized ribozyme, at around 50 nucleotides, suggests the feasibility of achieving autocatalytic functions with RNA strands that could have formed prebiotically.
Article Abstract
The R3C ligase ribozyme is an artificial ligase ribozyme produced by modification of the ribozyme that lacks cytidine. Here, we attempted to modify the original R3C ribozyme (73 nucleotides) by reducing the number of nucleotides while maintaining the maximum possible catalytic efficiency. By partially deleting both the "grip" (P4 + P5) and "hammer" (P3) stem-loops, we found the critical border to retain activity comparable to that of full-length R3C. The three-way junction structure was necessary to maintain enzymatic function and the stability of the "grip" (P4 + P5) stem had a large influence on the catalytic activity of R3C. The final minimized ribozyme we obtained comprised ~50 nucleotides, comparable to the estimated length of prebiotically synthesized RNA. Our findings suggest that the autocatalytic function in ribozymes is indeed possible to obtain using sequence lengths achievable with prebiotic synthesis.
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Source |
|---|---|
| http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4192621 | PMC |
| http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/biology3030452 | DOI Listing |
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