The Endless Subtleties of RNA-Protein Complexes
Eric Westhof and Valerie Fritsch
Structure, 19, 902-903 (2011)
As in other occasions the authors give a good idea of what is to come in the field of RNA, or at least, what would be nice to see coming. In this case they comment on the work done at Juli Feigon's lab at UCLA on the interaction of a protein which binds a double-stranded RNA region of around 14 base-pairs and which contains two G.U wobble base-pairs and is flanked by a tetraloop. Westhof and Fritsch mention two tricks by which proteins can recognize double-stranded RNA helical regions. One is that the helical region per-se is "altered" from a canonical Watson-Crick paired one through bulges in the helical stem or non-canonical pairings modulating it's major groove so that it looks more like a B-DNA conformation one, that is, one which is wider and not as narrow, allowing for sequence recognition. The second trick, and which is the one adopted by the dsRBD (double-stranded RNA Binding Domain) of the reviewed NMR structural work, is that of interacting with the single nucleotides of the loop region. The Feigon lab. work shows how a tetraloop with a different sequence than the "canonical" AGNN one, but which accomplishes a very similar three dimensional fold, can also be bound by the dsRBD showing that not all can be predicted through RNA sequence alone, but that structural data is essential for understanding the details of protein-RNA interactions.
The Structures under PDB_ID: 2LBS have not been released yet.
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