Monday, February 1st, 2016
Gan and Gunsalus published a paper in Nucleic Acids Research on structural modeling, showing that the ability of microRNAs to recognize diverse mRNA targets requires conformational adaptation of the Argonaute protein.
Elastic network theory reveals global modes of motion that allow Ago to accommodate distorted RNA duplexes, which are expected to form at non-canonical target sites bound by RISC in vivo. Insights from 3D modeling into the energy landscape of miRNA target recognition may lead to improved miRNA target prediction methods.
Read the full paper here.
