Study of E. coli Hfq's RNA annealing acceleration and duplex destabilization activities using substrates with different GC-contents.

ABSTRACT: Folding of RNA molecules into their functional three-dimensional structures is often supported by RNA chaperones, some of which can catalyse the two elementary reactions helix disruption and helix formation. Hfq is one such RNA chaperone, but its strand displacement activity is controversial. Whereas some groups found Hfq to destabilize secondary structures, others did not observe such an activity with their RNA substrates. We studied Hfq's activities using a set of short RNAs of different thermodynamic stabilities (GC-contents from 4.8% to 61.9%), but constant length. We show that Hfq's strand displacement as well as its annealing activity are strongly dependent on the substrate's GC-content. However, this is due to Hfq's preferred binding of AU-rich sequences and not to the substrate's t

SUBMITTER: Doetsch M 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3592463 | biostudies-literature | 2013 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature