Poster abstracts
Poster number 124 submitted by Md Sharear Saon
Identifying and characterizing charged and tautomeric G•U wobbles in RNA
Md Sharear Saon (Department of Chemistry, Center for RNA Molecular Biology, Pennsylvania State University), Catherine A. Douds (Center for RNA Molecular Biology, Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Pennsylvania State University), Andrew J. Veenis (Department of Chemistry, Center for RNA Molecular Biology, Pennsylvania State University), Neela Yennawar (Huck Institutes of the Life Sciences, Pennsylvania State University), Philip C. Bevilacqua (Department of Chemistry, Center for RNA Molecular Biology, Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Pennsylvania State University)
Abstract:
RNA can be an enzyme (ribozyme), small molecule sensor (riboswitch), and a vaccine. It was also critical to the origin of life in the RNA world scenario. This is astonishing given that the intrinsic molecular diversity of RNA is quite limited. To date, covalent modifications of nucleotides have received widespread attention, but much less is known about any non-covalent changes of the nucleotides. The latter can be classified into novel charged and tautomeric forms of the bases, which involve changes in protonation state and proton location, respectively. Like covalent modifications of RNA, non-covalent modifications may provide additional stability and functionality to the RNA. We used a cheminformatic approach to identify non-covalent changes to RNA and propose two novel orientations of G•U wobble base pairs: one in which U is negatively charged and one in which either of the bases is tautomeric. We provide widespread structural support of these proton-altered G•U wobbles within RNA 3D structures in the Protein Data Bank. Cheminformatics pipelines like this one can be designed with other non-Watson-Crick-Franklin pairs to identify further novel protonation states of RNA.
Keywords: anionic RNA, Rare wobble base pairs, RNA modifications