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Since the discovery that RNA can be an
enzyme, a fundamental question has emerged: How does an RNA
molecule fold up into a precise three-dimensional structure capable
of catalyzing a chemical reaction? This problem is interesting not
only from the point of view of living organisms, but also in terms
of trying to understand how a pre-biotic "RNA World" populated by
ribozymes, as evolutionary precursors of today's protein enzymes
found in all living organisms, might have functioned. The first
ribozyme structure to be elucidated was that of the hammerhead RNA,
a small self-cleaving RNA. Currently we are attempting to
understand the catalytic mechanism of this RNA, and to elucidate
the structures of several other catalytic RNAs as well as various
structural genomic and other non-coding RNAs. A recently published
example is the crystal structure of the
s2m RNA from the SARS virus 3’-UTR.
Three recent projects are summarized on separate web pages:
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