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Efficient RNA ligation by reverse‐joined hairpin ribozymes and engineering of twin ribozymes consisting of conventional and reverse‐joined hairpin ribozyme units
Author(s) -
Ivanov Sergei A.,
Vauléon Stéphanie,
Müller Sabine
Publication year - 2005
Publication title -
the febs journal
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.981
H-Index - 204
eISSN - 1742-4658
pISSN - 1742-464X
DOI - 10.1111/j.1742-4658.2005.04865.x
Subject(s) - ribozyme , ligase ribozyme , hairpin ribozyme , rna , vs ribozyme , mammalian cpeb3 ribozyme , biology , chemistry , computational biology , genetics , gene
In recent years major progress has been made in elucidating the mechanism and structure of catalytic RNA molecules, and we are now beginning to understand ribozymes well enough to turn them into useful tools. Work in our laboratory has focused on the development of twin ribozymes for site‐specific RNA sequence alteration. To this end, we followed a strategy that relies on the combination of two ribozyme units into one molecule (hence dubbed twin ribozyme). Here, we present reverse‐joined hairpin ribozymes that are structurally optimized and which, in addition to cleavage, catalyse efficient RNA ligation. The most efficient variant ligated its appropriate RNA substrate with a single turnover rate constant of 1.1 min −1 and a final yield of 70%. We combined a reverse‐joined hairpin ribozyme with a conventional hairpin ribozyme to create a twin ribozyme that mediates the insertion of four additional nucleotides into a predetermined position of a substrate RNA, and thus mimics, at the RNA level, the repair of a short deletion mutation; 17% of the initial substrate was converted to the insertion product.