Solving nucleic acid structures by molecular replacement: examples from group II intron studies
- Yale University, New Haven, CT 06511 (United States)
- Argonne National Laboratory, Argonne, IL 60439 (United States)
Strategies for phasing nucleic acid structures by molecular replacement, using both experimental and de novo designed models, are discussed. Structured RNA molecules are key players in ensuring cellular viability. It is now emerging that, like proteins, the functions of many nucleic acids are dictated by their tertiary folds. At the same time, the number of known crystal structures of nucleic acids is also increasing rapidly. In this context, molecular replacement will become an increasingly useful technique for phasing nucleic acid crystallographic data in the near future. Here, strategies to select, create and refine molecular-replacement search models for nucleic acids are discussed. Using examples taken primarily from research on group II introns, it is shown that nucleic acids are amenable to different and potentially more flexible and sophisticated molecular-replacement searches than proteins. These observations specifically aim to encourage future crystallographic studies on the newly discovered repertoire of noncoding transcripts.
- OSTI ID:
- 22347829
- Journal Information:
- Acta Crystallographica. Section D: Biological Crystallography, Vol. 69, Issue Pt 11; Other Information: PMCID: PMC3817690; PMID: 24189228; PUBLISHER-ID: ba5198; OAI: oai:pubmedcentral.nih.gov:3817690; Copyright (c) Marcia et al. 2013; This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Licence, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original authors and source are cited.; Country of input: International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA); ISSN 0907-4449
- Country of Publication:
- Denmark
- Language:
- English
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