The 'RNA world' hypothesis holds that during evolution the structural and enzymatic functions initially served by RNA were assumed by proteins, leading to the latter's domination of biological catalysis. This progression can still be seen in modern biology, where ribozymes, such as the ribosome and RNase P, have evolved into protein-dependent RNA catalysts ('RNPzymes'). Similarly, group I introns use RNA-catalysed splicing reactions, but many function as RNPzymes bound to proteins that stabilize their catalytically active RNA structure. One such protein, the Neurospora crassa mitochondrial tyrosyl-tRNA synthetase (TyrRS; CYT-18), is bifunctional and both aminoacylates mitochondrial tRNA(Tyr) and promotes the splicing of mitochondrial group I introns. Here we determine a 4.5-A co-crystal structure of the Twort orf142-I2 group I intron ribozyme bound to splicing-active, carboxy-terminally truncated CYT-18. The structure shows that the group I intron binds across the two subunits of the homodimeric protein with a newly evolved RNA-binding surface distinct from that which binds tRNA(Tyr). This RNA binding surface provides an extended scaffold for the phosphodiester backbone of the conserved catalytic core of the intron RNA, allowing the protein to promote the splicing of a wide variety of group I introns. The group I intron-binding surface includes three small insertions and additional structural adaptations relative to non-splicing bacterial TyrRSs, indicating a multistep adaptation for splicing function. The co-crystal structure provides insight into how CYT-18 promotes group I intron splicing, how it evolved to have this function, and how proteins could have incrementally replaced RNA structures during the transition from an RNA world to an RNP world.

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Summary Elucidating how homing endonucleases undergo changes in recognition site specificity will facilitate efforts to engineer proteins for gene therapy applications. I-SceI is a monomeric homing endonuclease that recognizes and cleaves within an 18-base-pair (bp) target. It tolerates limited degeneracy in its target sequence, including substitution of a C/G+4 base-pair for the wild-type A/T+4 base-pair. Libraries encoding randomized amino acids at I-SceI residue positions that contact or are proximal to A/T+4 were used in conjunction with a bacterial one-hybrid system to select I-SceI derivatives that bind to recognition sites containing either the A/T+4 or C/G+4 base-pairs. As expected, isolates encoding wild-type residues at the randomized positions were selected using either target sequence. All I-SceI proteins isolated using the C/G+4 recognition site included small side chain substitutions at G100, and either contained (K86R/G100T, K86R/G100S and K86R/G100C) or lacked (G100A, G100T) a K86R substitution. Interestingly, the binding affinities of the selected variants for the wild-type A/T+4 target are 4–11-fold lower than that of wild-type I-SceI, whereas those for the C/G+4 target are similar. The increased specificity of the mutant proteins is also evident in binding experiments in vivo. These differences in binding affinities account for the observed ~36-fold difference in target preference between the K86R/G100T and wild-type proteins in DNA cleavage assays. An X-ray crystal structure of the K86R/G100T mutant protein bound to a DNA duplex containing the C/G+4 substitution suggests how sequence specificity of a homing enzyme can increase. This biochemical and structural analysis defines one pathway by which site specificity is augmented for a homing endonuclease.

Splicing is initiated by a productive interaction between the pre-mRNA and the U1 snRNP, in which a short RNA duplex is established between the 5′ splice site of a pre-mRNA and the 5′ end of the U1 snRNA. A long-standing puzzle has been why the AU dincucleotide at the 5′-end of the U1 snRNA is highly conserved, despite the absence of an apparent role in the formation of the duplex. To explore this conundrum, we varied this AU dinucleotide into all possible permutations and analyzed the resulting molecular consequences. This led to the unexpected findings that the AU dinucleotide dictates the optimal binding of cap-binding complex (CBC) to the 5′ end of the nascent U1 snRNA, which ultimately influences the utilization of U1 snRNP in splicing. Our data also provide a structural interpretation as to why the AU dinucleotide is conserved during evolution.