Specific structural elements of the T-box riboswitch drive the two-step binding of the tRNA ligand

T-box riboswitches are cis-regulatory RNA elements that regulate the expression of proteins involved in amino acid biosynthesis and transport by binding to specific tRNAs and sensing their aminoacylation state. While the T-box modular structural elements that recognize different parts of a tRNA have been identified, the kinetic trajectory describing how these interactions are established temporally remains unclear. Using smFRET, we demonstrate that tRNA binds to the riboswitch in two steps, first anticodon recognition followed by the sensing of the 3’ NCCA end, with the second step accompanied by a T-box riboswitch conformational change. Studies on site-specific mutants highlight that specific T-box structural elements drive the two-step binding process in a modular fashion. Our results set up a kinetic framework describing tRNA binding by T-box riboswitches, and suggest such binding mechanism is kinetically beneficial for efficient, co-transcriptional recognition of the cognate tRNA ligand.

• Publication year

  2018

• Venue

  eLife

• Publication date

  2018-09-25

• Fields of study

  Biology, Medicine, Chemistry

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.7554/eLife.39518PMID 30251626PMCID 6197855
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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