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The elusive quest for RNA knots
Physical entanglement, and particularly knots arise spontaneously in equilibrated polymers that are sufficiently long and densely packed. Biopolymers are no exceptions: knots have long been known to occur in proteins as well as in encapsidated viral DNA. The rapidly growing number of RNA structures...
Autores principales: | , , , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
Taylor & Francis
2016
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4829277/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26828280 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15476286.2015.1132069 |
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author | Burton, Aaron S. Di Stefano, Marco Lehman, Niles Orland, Henri Micheletti, Cristian |
author_facet | Burton, Aaron S. Di Stefano, Marco Lehman, Niles Orland, Henri Micheletti, Cristian |
author_sort | Burton, Aaron S. |
collection | PubMed |
description | Physical entanglement, and particularly knots arise spontaneously in equilibrated polymers that are sufficiently long and densely packed. Biopolymers are no exceptions: knots have long been known to occur in proteins as well as in encapsidated viral DNA. The rapidly growing number of RNA structures has recently made it possible to investigate the incidence of physical knots in this type of biomolecule, too. Strikingly, no knots have been found to date in the known RNA structures. In this Point of View Article we discuss the absence of knots in currently available RNAs and consider the reasons why knots in RNA have not yet been found, despite the expectation that they should exist in Nature. We conclude by singling out a number of RNA sequences that, based on the properties of their predicted secondary structures, are good candidates for knotted RNAs. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-4829277 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2016 |
publisher | Taylor & Francis |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-48292772016-04-28 The elusive quest for RNA knots Burton, Aaron S. Di Stefano, Marco Lehman, Niles Orland, Henri Micheletti, Cristian RNA Biol Point of View Physical entanglement, and particularly knots arise spontaneously in equilibrated polymers that are sufficiently long and densely packed. Biopolymers are no exceptions: knots have long been known to occur in proteins as well as in encapsidated viral DNA. The rapidly growing number of RNA structures has recently made it possible to investigate the incidence of physical knots in this type of biomolecule, too. Strikingly, no knots have been found to date in the known RNA structures. In this Point of View Article we discuss the absence of knots in currently available RNAs and consider the reasons why knots in RNA have not yet been found, despite the expectation that they should exist in Nature. We conclude by singling out a number of RNA sequences that, based on the properties of their predicted secondary structures, are good candidates for knotted RNAs. Taylor & Francis 2016-02-01 /pmc/articles/PMC4829277/ /pubmed/26828280 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15476286.2015.1132069 Text en © 2016 The Author(s). Published with license by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/ This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/), which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The moral rights of the named author(s) have been asserted. |
spellingShingle | Point of View Burton, Aaron S. Di Stefano, Marco Lehman, Niles Orland, Henri Micheletti, Cristian The elusive quest for RNA knots |
title | The elusive quest for RNA knots |
title_full | The elusive quest for RNA knots |
title_fullStr | The elusive quest for RNA knots |
title_full_unstemmed | The elusive quest for RNA knots |
title_short | The elusive quest for RNA knots |
title_sort | elusive quest for rna knots |
topic | Point of View |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4829277/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26828280 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15476286.2015.1132069 |
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