title: Structural composition of hammerhead ribozymes.
abstract: Eleven kinds of hammerhead ribozymes were designed and synthesized to investigate the structural composition of the complexes and to find suitable crystallization conditions, the substrate chains having been modified to prevent hydrolysis. Electrophoresis patterns indicated that the two strands except for the substrate chain form a binary complex and that they form a ternary complex when mixed with the substrate chain. Both complexes were crystallized. The crystal of the binary complex belongs to a Laue symmetry of 32 (space group of P321, P3(1)21, or P3(2)21) with cell dimensions of a = b = 53.4 and c = 59.4 A. The volume per one nucleotide allows the asymmetric unit to contain one binary complex. Our results suggest that the catalytic part forms a rigid ribozyme structure which induces a scissile reaction when the substrate is bound, in a similar manner to an enzyme protein.
authors.affiliation: Faculty of Bioscience and Biotechnology, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Yokohama.
authors.forename: A
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Takenaka
authors.forename: O
authors.initials: O
authors.lastname: Matsumoto
authors.forename: Y
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Chen
authors.forename: S
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Hasegawa
authors.forename: T
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Chatake
authors.forename: M
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Tsunoda
authors.forename: T
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Ohta
authors.forename: Y
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Komatsu
authors.forename: M
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Koizumi
authors.forename: E
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Ohtsuka
mesh_terms: D001483:Base Sequence; D018360:Crystallography, X-Ray; D004586:Electrophoresis; D008969:Molecular Sequence Data; D009690:Nucleic Acid Conformation; D016337:RNA, Catalytic / Q000138:chemical synthesis / Q000737:chemistry*
chemical_list: D016337:RNA, Catalytic