An investigation of the binding sites of proteins S8, L23 and L24 on the ribosomal RNAs of Escherichia coli by electron microscopy.

An electron microscopic method was used to investigate the binding regions of proteins S8 on 16S RNA, and proteins L23 and L24 on 23S RNA. Regions of the RNA that were not stabilised by the protein were completely denatured in 80% dimethyl-sulfoxide. The lengths of these denatured RNA regions were compared with that of the whole denatured RNA. Conclusions are drawn concerning the approximate location of the three proteins and these results are correlated with both RNA structural data and RNA sequence data on the RNA binding regions of the proteins.