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Protein-RNA interaction restricts telomerase from running through the stop sign

Telomerase is a unique reverse transcriptase in that it repetitively uses a short piece of its RNA component as template to synthesize DNA. A new crystal structure of a part of the Tetrahymena telomerase ribonucleoprotein reveals how reverse transcription is limited to this specific template region.

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Figure 1: Hypothesized evolutionary path of biocatalysis.
Figure 2: Comparison between telomerase and other reverse transcriptases.
Figure 3: Location of the TBE in TER and the TRBD in the TERT protein.

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Correspondence to Thomas R Cech.

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Thomas R. Cech is on the Board of Directors of Merck, Inc.

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Xi, L., Cech, T. Protein-RNA interaction restricts telomerase from running through the stop sign. Nat Struct Mol Biol 22, 835–836 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1038/nsmb.3118

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