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Ancient, giant riboswitches at atomic resolution

Nature Structural & Molecular Biology volume 19, pages 1208–1209 (2012)Cite this article

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Two recent reports on the structures of cobalamin riboswitches uncover amazing details on how a ubiquitous riboswitch class selectively grips a large and ancient coenzyme, revealing that some variants in this class have evolved to detect a different metabolite target.

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Figure 1: Schematic representation of the riboswitch-binding sites for AdoCbl (left) and AqCbl (right).

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Acknowledgements

RNA research in the author's laboratory is supported by the US National Institutes of Health and by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

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  1. Ronald R. Breaker is at the Department of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology and Department of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, USA. He is also at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, USA.,

    Ronald R Breaker

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Correspondence to Ronald R Breaker.

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The author is a cofounder of BioRelix, which has licensed riboswitch intellectual property from Yale University.

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Breaker, R. Ancient, giant riboswitches at atomic resolution. Nat Struct Mol Biol 19, 1208–1209 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1038/nsmb.2453

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