G-quadruplexes are noncanonical nucleic acid structures stabilized by stacked guanosine tetrads. They occur frequently in genomes and have been proposed to play widespread biological roles. Although often studied as monomers, G-quadruplexes can also multimerize to form various types of higher-order structures. This increases their structural diversity and can also change their biochemical properties.
In their recent work, a team of scientists led by Edward A. Curtis from IOCB Prague shows that multimerization of some G-quadruplexes is inhibited by physiological concentrations of the biologically ubiquitous cofactor GTP. The GTP ligand stabilizes the monomeric form of the G-quadruplex by becoming incorporated into a tetrad.
These results suggest possible roles for GTP-dependent multimeric G-quadruplexes in both synthetic and natural biological systems.
Read the paper:
- Kolesnikova, S.; Srb, P.; Vrzal, L.; Lawrence, M. S.; Veverka, V.; Curtis, E. A. GTP-Dependent Formation of Multimeric G-Quadruplexes. ACS Chemical Biology 2019, 14, 1951-1963. https://doi.org/10.1021/acschembio.9b00428
