Pressure modulates the self-cleavage step of the hairpin ribozyme

Caroline Schuabb, Narendra Kumar, Salome Pataraia, Dominik Marx () and Roland Winter ()
Additional contact information
Caroline Schuabb: Physikalische Chemie I—Biophysikalische Chemie, Fakultät für Chemie und Chemische Biologie, TU Dortmund
Narendra Kumar: Lehrstuhl für Theoretische Chemie, Ruhr-Universität Bochum
Salome Pataraia: Physikalische Chemie I—Biophysikalische Chemie, Fakultät für Chemie und Chemische Biologie, TU Dortmund
Dominik Marx: Lehrstuhl für Theoretische Chemie, Ruhr-Universität Bochum
Roland Winter: Physikalische Chemie I—Biophysikalische Chemie, Fakultät für Chemie und Chemische Biologie, TU Dortmund

Nature Communications, 2017, vol. 8, issue 1, 1-10

Abstract: Abstract The ability of certain RNAs, denoted as ribozymes, to not only store genetic information but also catalyse chemical reactions gave support to the RNA world hypothesis as a putative step in the development of early life on Earth. This, however, might have evolved under extreme environmental conditions, including the deep sea with pressures in the kbar regime. Here we study pressure-induced effects on the self-cleavage of hairpin ribozyme by following structural changes in real-time. Our results suggest that compression of the ribozyme leads to an accelerated transesterification reaction, being the self-cleavage step, although the overall process is retarded in the high-pressure regime. The results reveal that favourable interactions between the reaction site and neighbouring nucleobases are strengthened under pressure, resulting therefore in an accelerated self-cleavage step upon compression. These results suggest that properly engineered ribozymes may also act as piezophilic biocatalysts in addition to their hitherto known properties.

Date: 2017
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms14661 Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:8:y:2017:i:1:d:10.1038_ncomms14661

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/ncomms14661

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().