Nucleic acid chaperons: a theory of an RNA-assisted protein folding.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Proteins are assumed to contain all the information necessary for unambiguous folding (Anfinsen's principle). However, ab initio structure prediction is often not successful because the amino acid sequence itself is not sufficient to guide between endless folding possibilities. It seems to be a logical to try to find the "missing" information in nucleic acids, in the redundant codon base.

Results

mRNA energy dot plots and protein residue contact maps were found to be rather similar. The structure of mRNA is also conserved if the protein structure is conserved, even if the sequence similarity is low. These observations led me to suppose that some similarity might exist between nucleic acid and protein folding. I found that amino acid pairs, which are co-located in

SUBMITTER: Biro JC 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC1232867 | biostudies-literature | 2005 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature