The primary paper and commentary (Woodson, 1996; Weeks and Cech, 1996), to be discussed 5/3/96, present experiments and perspectives on mechanisms of protein-assisted RNA catalysis. The relatively simple system studied here may give insights into more complicated splicing and translation systems. The reading is intended to provide other examples and experimental background.
Background Area (paper) Structural changes upon CBP2 binding to the bI5 intron (Weeks and Cech, 1995b) Characterization and kinetics of bI5 splicing (Weeks and Cech, 1995a) Ribosome assembly (Powers et al., 1993) Discovery of CBP2 as a splicing cofactor (Gampel et al., 1989) RNA chaperones (Coetzee et al., 1994) tRNA synthetase as a splicing cofactor (Guo and Lambowitz, 1992) Kinetics of same: Alternative pathways (Saldanha et al., 1995) Capture of a small RNA loop-loop structure (Eguchi and Tomizawa, 1990)Coetzee, T., Herschlag, D., and Belfort, M. (1994). "E. coli proteins, including ribosomal protein S12, facilitate in vitro splicing of phage T4 introns by acting as RNA chaperones." Genes Dev. 8, 1575-1588.
Eguchi, Y. and Tomizawa, J. (1990). "Complex formed by complementary RNA stem-loops and its stabilization by a protein: Function of ColE1 Rom protein." Cell 60, 199-209.
Gampel, A., Nishikimi, M., and Tzagaloff, A. (1989). "CBP2 protein promotes in vitro excision of a yeast mitochondrial group I intron." Mol. Cell. Biol. 9, 5424-5433.
Guo, Q. and Lambowitz, A. M. (1992). "A tyrosyl-tRNA synthetase binds specifically to the group I intron catalytic core." Genes Dev. 6, 357-372.
Powers, T., Daubresse, G., and Noller, H. F. (1993). "Dynamics of in vitro assembly of 16 S rRNA into 30 S ribosomal subunits." J. Mol. Biol. 232, 362-374.
Saldanha, R. J., Patel, S. S., Surendran, R., Lee, J. C., and Lambowitz, A. M. (1995). "Involvement of Neurospora mitochondrial tyrosyl-tRNA synthetase in RNA splicing. A new method for purifying the protein and characterization of physical and enzymatic properties pertinent to splicing." Biochemistry 34, 1275-1287.
Weeks, K. M. and Cech, T. R. (1995a). "Efficient Protein-Facilitated Splicing of the Yeast Mitochondrial bI5 Intron." Biochemistry 34, 7728-7738.
Weeks, K. M. and Cech, T. R. (1995b). "Protein Facilitation of Group I Splicing by Assembly of the Catalytic Core and the 5-prime Splice Site Domain." Cell 82, 221-230.
Weeks, K. M. and Cech, T. R. (1996). "Assembly of a Ribonucleoprotein Catalyst by Tertiary Structure Capture." Science 271, 345-348.
Woodson, S. A. (1996). "Macromolecular complexes: How RNA and protein get together." Curr. Biol. 6, 23-25. (photocopies will be provided)