A fast selenium derivatization strategy for crystallization and phasing of nucleic acid structures

The growing number of biologically important nucleic acid sequences (DNA and RNA) demands a fast and reliable method for their de novo three-dimensional structure determination. In this work, we described a fast and inexpensive strategy for the crystallization and phasing of structures of nucleic acid and nucleic acid/protein complexes.

In the early 1990's, covalent modification of nucleic acid using Selenium was introduced as a new approach to facilitate crystal structure determination of nucleic acid (in case of failure of classical molecular replacement or heavy atoms derivatives techniques, such modification allows to use the powerful multiwavelength anomalous dispersion technique to tackle the phase problem). Hovewer, due to a cumbersome and expensive synthesis of such Seleno-labeled nucleic acid, only few structures have been determined.

We have developed an efficient strategy for crystallization and structure determination of nucleic acids by exploiting the similar crystallization properties of 2'-SeCH3- and 2'-OCH3-modification.

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