Methodological Advancements and Improvements in Structural Biology

Annalisa Pastore^*

• King's College London, London, United Kingdom

can be used for different chemical, biological and medical applications.The authors discussed the repository and its merits and analysed the possible limitations and future updates.Finally, the paper by Kara et al. (6) discusses an easy and straightforward NMR-based method to study protein-RNA interactions and to evaluate the binding of pairs of proteins to a single-stranded RNA under physiological conditions. The authors showed that they can readily incorporate a 19 F atom on the ribose of nucleotides in any single strand RNA sequence. As a result, addition of an RNA binding protein to the RNA causes perturbation of the intensity of the 19 F NMR signal changes when the 19 F atom is located near the protein binding site. These studies can in principle be carried out in a nuclear extract that mimics the physiological environment in which these protein-ssRNA interactions occur. The authors demonstrated that a trifluoromethoxy group (-OCF3) incorporated in the 2' ribose position of single strand RNA sequences increases the sensitivity of the NMR signal.These technical advancements demonstrate how active structural biology still is in the machine learning era and provide useful guidelines to improve the standing techniques.