NMR Spectroscopy: An Excellent Tool to Understand RNA and Carbohydrate Recognition by Proteins

Antoine Cléry; Mario Schubert; Frédéric H.-T. Allain

doi:10.2533/chimia.2012.741

NMR Spectroscopy: An Excellent Tool to Understand RNA and Carbohydrate Recognition by Proteins

Authors

Antoine Cléry Institute for Molecular Biology and Biophysics ETH Zürich CH-8093 Zürich, Switzerland
Mario Schubert Institute for Molecular Biology and Biophysics ETH Zürich CH-8093 Zürich, Switzerland. schubert@mol.biol.ethz.ch
Frédéric H.-T. Allain Institute for Molecular Biology and Biophysics ETH Zürich CH-8093 Zürich, Switzerland. allain@mol.biol.ethz.ch

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.2533/chimia.2012.741

Keywords:

Nmr spectroscopy, Protein–carbohydrate complex, Protein–rna complex, Protein structure, Specific interaction

Abstract

Structural biology plays a key role in understanding how networks of protein interactions with their partners are organized at the atomic level. In this review, we show that NMR is a very efficient method to solve 3D structures of protein – RNA and protein–carbohydrate complexes of high quality. We explain the importance of studying such interactions and describe the main steps that are required to determine structures of these types of complexes by NMR. Finally, we show that X-ray crystallography and NMR are complementary methods and briefly report on advantages and disadvantages of each approach.