Poster abstracts
Poster number 120 submitted by Rui Gan
STARzyme: a ribozyme with tRNA synthetase activity
Rui Gan (Biochemistry, Purdue University), Hillary Aguilar (Biochemistry, Purdue University), Blair Chen (Biochemistry, Purdue University), Barbara Golden (Biochemistry, Purdue University)
Abstract:
Unnatural amino acids (UAAs) are widely used in the field of post-translational modification, biospecific antibody, replication-incompetent virus, therapeutics enzymes, etc. Currently, the incorporation of UAAs is mainly relied on the engineering of the protein tRNA synthetases. However, the chemical diversity of the introduced UAAs is restricted by the specificity of the protein’s active site, thus, only a limited number of UAAs have been successfully incorporated. In this work, a ribozyme with tRNA synthetase activity was created and named STARzyme (specific tRNA aminoacylation ribozyme). There are two modules in the STARzyme, one module is the T-box riboswitch RNA that binds to a specific tRNA through codon-anticodon interaction; the other module is the flexizyme (flexible ribozyme) that catalyzes the aminoacylation through binding the CCA tail of tRNAs. By fusing the two modules together, the STARzyme is able to put a variety of UAAs into a specific tRNA. And thus, the chemical diversity of UAA substrates has the potential to be greatly expanded.
Keywords: unnatural amino acids, aminoacylation, ribozyme