This is a proposal to investigate some basic properties of Ribonucleic acids (RNA), continuing work initiated in the earlier grant of the same name. The proposal has two parts. The first is the investigation of the interactions of free amino acids with RNA molecules. This should elucidate the interaction of proteins and peptides with RNA molecules by breaking this interaction into smaller parts. Such amino acid-nucleotide interactions are essential parts of the regulation of genetic activity in healthy and diseased states of all organisms. The second area of investigation is the discovery of RNA catalyses that form acid anhydride bonds to activate amino acids, and that form peptide bonds. If efficient catalysts of such reactions can be found, this would facilitate search for parallel RNA catalysts in contemporary organisms, to see whether such molecules cab have a biomedical role. These two investigations taken together will achieve the overall goal of the original project, which is to demonstrate whether RNA catalysis of genetic translation is possible, and may therefore have an evolutionary or present role in Biology.
| Yarus, Michael (2017) The Genetic Code and RNA-Amino Acid Affinities. Life (Basel) 7: |
| Turk-Macleod, Rebecca M; Puthenvedu, Deepa; Majerfeld, Irene et al. (2012) The plausibility of RNA-templated peptides: simultaneous RNA affinity for adjacent peptide side chains. J Mol Evol 74:217-25 |
| Turk, Rebecca M; Illangasekare, Mali; Yarus, Michael (2011) Catalyzed and spontaneous reactions on ribozyme ribose. J Am Chem Soc 133:6044-50 |
| Yarus, Michael (2011) Getting past the RNA world: the initial Darwinian ancestor. Cold Spring Harb Perspect Biol 3: |
| Illangasekare, Mali; Turk, Rebecca; Peterson, G Colin et al. (2010) Chiral histidine selection by D-ribose RNA. RNA 16:2370-83 |
| Majerfeld, Irene; Chocholousova, Jana; Malaiya, Vikas et al. (2010) Nucleotides that are essential but not conserved; a sufficient L-tryptophan site in RNA. RNA 16:1915-24 |
| Turk, Rebecca M; Chumachenko, Nataliya V; Yarus, Michael (2010) Multiple translational products from a five-nucleotide ribozyme. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 107:4585-9 |
| Kennedy, Ryan; Lladser, Manuel E; Wu, Zhiyuan et al. (2010) Natural and artificial RNAs occupy the same restricted region of sequence space. RNA 16:280-9 |
| Janas, Teresa; Widmann, Jeremy Joseph; Knight, Rob et al. (2010) Simple, recurring RNA binding sites for L-arginine. RNA 16:805-16 |
| Chumachenko, N V; Novikov, Y; Yarus, M (2009) Rapid and simple ribozymic aminoacylation using three conserved nucleotides. J Am Chem Soc 131:5257-63 |
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