Abstract
Group II introns are self-splicing catalytic RNAs that are thought to be ancestral to the spliceosome. Here we report the 3.65-Å crystal structure of the group II intron from Oceanobacillus iheyensis in the pre-catalytic state. The structure reveals the conformation of the 5′ splice site in the catalytic core and represents the first structure of an intron prior to the first step of splicing.
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Acknowledgements
We thank the staff of the NE-CAT beamline ID-24 at the Advanced Photon Source of Argonne National Laboratory. We thank K. Keating for valuable discussions. This work was supported by startup funds from the University of California, San Diego (N.T.), and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (A.M.P.). R.T.C. was supported by the Cell, Molecular and Genetics (CMG) Training Program funded by the US National Institutes of Health predoctoral training grant T32GM007240.
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R.T.C., A.R.R., K.R.R. and N.T. conducted experiments. R.T.C., A.R.R. and N.T. designed the experiments. R.T.C., A.R.R., K.R.R., A.M.P. and N.T. analyzed the data. R.T.C. and N.T. wrote the manuscript, with input from all authors.
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Chan, R., Robart, A., Rajashankar, K. et al. Crystal structure of a group II intron in the pre-catalytic state. Nat Struct Mol Biol 19, 555–557 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1038/nsmb.2270
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nsmb.2270
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