Past Event: Oden Institute Seminar

RNA-protein interactions and the structure of the genetic code

Bojan Zagrovic, Department of Structural and Computational Biology at University of Vienna in Austria

Abstract

The notion of physicochemical complementarity is one of the most powerful mechanistic paradigms in molecular biology. Recently, we have revealed a robust, statistically significant matching between the nucleobase-density profiles of mRNA coding sequences and the nucleobase-binding profiles of the protein sequences they encode. For example, purine-density profiles of mRNA sequences mirror the guanine-affinity profiles of their cognate protein sequences with quantitative accuracy (median Pearson correlation coefficient |R| = 0.80 across the entire human proteome). Overall, our results support as well as redefine the stereochemical hypothesis concerning the origin of the genetic code, the idea that the code evolved from direct interactions between amino acids and the appropriate bases. Moreover, our findings support the possibility of direct, complementary, co-aligned interactions between mRNAs and their cognate proteins even in present-day cells, especially if both are unstructured, with implications extending to different facets of nucleic-acid/protein biology. In this talk, I will focus on different lines of evidence regarding the complementarity hypothesis, with a particular focus on experimental UV-crosslinking and immunoprecipitation (CLIP) results.