Slow Molecular Recognition by RNA
- ↵* Corresponding author; email: herschla{at}stanford.edu
Abstract
Molecular recognition is central to biological processes, function, and specificity. Proteins associate with ligands with maximal rates that match the theoretical limit set by the rate of diffusional collision and with a wide range of observed values. As less is known about RNA association, we compiled association rate constants for all RNA/ligand complexes that we could find in the literature. Like proteins, RNAs exhibit a wide range of association rate constants. However, the fastest RNA association rates are considerably slower than those of the fastest protein associations and fall well below the diffusional limit. The apparently general observation of slow association with RNAs has implications for evolution and for modern-day biology. Our compilation highlights a quantitative molecular property that can contribute to biological understanding and underscores our limited physical understanding of molecular recognition events.
Keywords
- Received May 8, 2017.
- Accepted September 26, 2017.
- Published by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press for the RNA Society
This article is distributed exclusively by the RNA Society for the first 12 months after the full-issue publication date (see http://rnajournal.cshlp.org/site/misc/terms.xhtml). After 12 months, it is available under a Creative Commons License (Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International), as described at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/.
