Small ribosomal subunit

Most of these morphs were made for Venki Ramakrishnan's group at Cambridge. I found that certain parts of the motion were very hard to simulate using adiabatic mapping, so a few individual bases had to be rotated manually in PyMOL after morphing.

The main interpolation shown is between:

• The decoding site of the native 30S.
• The same site bound to mRNA and tRNA.

Binding of m/tRNA induces some drastic local changes in the 16S RNA such as the bases A1492, A1493, and G530 which flip 180 degrees. The backbone also moves slightly. All chains present in the published structures are shown here.

Many more RNA movies are listed here.

Entire subunit binding the anticodon stem loop. There is also a version of this movie without proteins. An even simpler version has no basis in reality but clearly illustrates the global conformational change. Same transition as above zoomed in to show local conformational changes. Movie showing conformational change on binding of the antibiotic paromomycin (green spheres). Bases A1492 and A1493 are locked into their flipped positions. Closeup of the above.

---

Copyright 2002 Nat Echols, M. Gerstein.
Mark.Gerstein@yale.edu
Last modified 1-6-04.