Feigon Juli, Chan Henry, Jiang Jiansen
Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, University of California, Los Angeles, CA, USA.
Department of Microbiology, Immunology and Molecular Genetics, University of California, Los Angeles, CA, USA.
FEBS J. 2016 Jun;283(11):2044-50. doi: 10.1111/febs.13691. Epub 2016 Mar 17.
Telomerase is a ribonucleoprotein complex that helps maintain telomeres, the physical ends of linear chromosomes. The low cellular levels of telomerase, propensity for telomerase reverse transcriptase and other telomerase proteins to aggregate, and cell cycle regulation of telomerase assembly in most organisms has made it a challenging complex for structural biology. Here we review recent progress in determining the structural basis of Tetrahymena telomerase holoenzyme function and interaction at telomeres from solution NMR, X-ray crystallography and electron microscopy studies, including the first cryoelectron microscopy structure of a telomerase holoenzyme (Science, 350, 2015, aab4070).
端粒酶是一种核糖核蛋白复合体，有助于维持端粒，即线性染色体的物理末端。在大多数生物体中，端粒酶的细胞水平较低，端粒酶逆转录酶和其他端粒酶蛋白易于聚集，且端粒酶组装受细胞周期调控，这些因素使得它成为结构生物学中一个具有挑战性的复合体。在此，我们综述了近期通过溶液核磁共振、X射线晶体学和电子显微镜研究，在确定嗜热四膜虫端粒酶全酶功能的结构基础以及在端粒处的相互作用方面取得的进展，包括端粒酶全酶的首个冷冻电子显微镜结构（《科学》，350卷，2015年，aab4070）。
