Mighty tiny
- Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics, Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis, Missouri 63110, USA
- Corresponding author: kathleenhal{at}gmail.com
This extract was created in the absence of an abstract.
In 1983, Woese, Gutell, Gupta, and Noller noted that 16S rRNA contained a disproportionate number of hairpins with only four nucleotides in the loop. The loop sequences of these “tetraloops” were not random, but consisted of two classes: GNRA and UNCG, where N is anything and R is purine. This observation was intriguing but also puzzling, for it begged the question of their functions.
The UUCG tetraloop
Five years later, the UUCG tetraloop was found in bacteriophage T4 mRNA. Taking advantage of the reductionist approach to RNA structure/function, the tetraloop was removed from its mRNA, and examined as an isolated hairpin. The dramatic finding was that this tiny RNA secondary structure, with its UUCG loop and C:G loop-closing base pair, was “extraordinarily stable.” The significance of this finding was not lost on the investigators in this first study: The authors include Stormo, Uhlenbeck, Tinoco, and Gold, all recognized leaders in RNA biology.
The …
