title: Catalytic activities of hammerhead ribozymes with a triterpenoid linker instead of stem/loop II.
abstract: 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.
authors.affiliation: Department of Synthetic Chemistry and Biological Chemistry, Faculty of Engineering, Kyoto University, Japan.
authors.forename: H
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Sugiyama
authors.forename: K
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Hatano
authors.forename: I
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: Saito
authors.forename: S
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Amontov
authors.forename: K
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Taira
mesh_terms: 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*
chemical_list: D016337:RNA, Catalytic; D014315:Triterpenes