Increased Affinity for RNA Targets Evolved Early in Animal and Plant Dicer Lineages through Different Structural Mechanisms.

ABSTRACT: Understanding the structural basis for evolutionary changes in protein function is central to molecular evolutionary biology and can help determine the extent to which functional convergence occurs through similar or different structural mechanisms. Here, we combine ancestral sequence reconstruction with functional characterization and structural modeling to directly examine the evolution of sequence-structure-function across the early differentiation of animal and plant Dicer/DCL proteins, which perform the first molecular step in RNA interference by identifying target RNAs and processing them into short interfering products. We found that ancestral Dicer/DCL proteins evolved similar increases in RNA target affinities as they diverged independently in animal and plant lineages. In both ca

SUBMITTER: Jia H 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5850739 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature