Lemay Jean-François, Lafontaine Daniel A
Département de biologie, Faculté des sciences, Université de Sherbrooke, Québec, Canada.
RNA. 2007 Mar;13(3):339-50. doi: 10.1261/rna.142007. Epub 2007 Jan 2.
The adenine riboswitch aptamer, the A box, positively regulates gene expression upon adenine binding. To provide insight into structure-function relationships, important for the adenine riboswitch aptamer, we have created alignments for six aptamer sequences that reveal the core requirements. In addition, 2-aminopurine (2AP) binding studies have been used to test the consensus sequence derived from the alignment. Overall, the consensus secondary structure is consistent with 2AP binding studies. However, a position in the core, previously identified as variable, shows restriction in nucleotide sequence. Furthermore, this restriction is found to be related with the ligand specificity of the riboswitch. The implications of this relationship for the riboswitch gene regulation mechanism are discussed.
腺嘌呤核糖开关适体(A盒)在结合腺嘌呤后正向调节基因表达。为了深入了解对腺嘌呤核糖开关适体至关重要的结构-功能关系,我们对六个适体序列进行了比对,揭示了核心要求。此外,已利用2-氨基嘌呤(2AP)结合研究来测试从比对中得出的共有序列。总体而言,共有二级结构与2AP结合研究结果一致。然而,核心区域中一个先前被确定为可变的位置显示出核苷酸序列的限制。此外,发现这种限制与核糖开关的配体特异性有关。讨论了这种关系对核糖开关基因调控机制的影响。