Catalytic activities of hammerhead ribozymes with a triterpenoid linker instead of stem/loop II.
A minizyme is a hammerhead ribozyme with short oligonucleotide linkers instead of stem/loop II. In a previous study we demonstrated that a minizyme with high-level activity forms a dimeric structure with a common stem II (Amontov and Taira, J. Am. Chem. Soc., 118 (1996) 1624-1628). As a continuation of this study, we recently examined whether a short oligonucleotide linker at stem/loop II could be replaced by a triterpenoid linker and whether the resulting minizymes with bulky hydrophobic groups would form dimeric structures. In contrast to the minizyme with high-level activity that we characterized in the previous study, minizymes that contained a triterpenoid group had low cleavage activities. The nature of the dependence of the activity on the concentration of ribozyme revealed that these minizymes with a triterpenoid group do not form dimeric structures. Thus, the low activities of these structures can be attributed to their failure to form dimers.
Sugiyama
H
H
Department of Synthetic Chemistry and Biological Chemistry, Faculty of Engineering, Kyoto University, Japan.
Hatano
K
K
Saito
I
I
Amontov
S
S
Taira
K
K
D001483:Base Sequence; D007700:Kinetics; D008956:Models, Chemical; D008969:Molecular Sequence Data; D009690:Nucleic Acid Conformation; D016337:RNA, Catalytic / Q000737:chemistry* / Q000378:metabolism*; D014315:Triterpenes / Q000737:chemistry*
D016337:RNA, Catalytic; D014315:Triterpenes