CRYSTALLOGRAPHIC STRUCTURES OF THE HAMMERHEAD RIBOZYME: Relationship to Ribozyme Folding and Catalysis

The hammerhead ribozyme is a small catalytic RNA that cleaves a target phosphodiester bond in a reaction dependent on divalent metal ions. Crystal structures of the hammerhead reveal the tertiary fold of an enzymatic “ground state” of the molecule; however, they do not clarify the catalytic mechanism of the ribozyme, presumably because a significant conformational rearrangement is required to reach an enzymatic transition state. The structural domains seen in the hammerhead can be related to sequence or structural motifs in transfer and ribosomal RNAs, suggesting that they represent tertiary building blocks that will be found in large, complex RNAs.