Covalent incorporation of selenium into oligonucleotides for X-ray crystal structure determination via MAD: Proof of principle

Marianna Teplova, Christopher J. Wilds, Zdzislaw Wawrzak, Valentina Tereshko, Quan Du, Nicolas Carrasco, Zhen Huang, Martin Egli*

*Corresponding author for this work

    Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

    64 Scopus citations

    Abstract

    Selenium was incorporated into an oligodeoxynucleotide in the form of 2′-methylseleno-uridine (USe). The X-ray crystal structure of the duplex [d(GCGTA)USed(ACGC)]2 was determined by the multiwavelength anomalous dispersion (MAD) technique and refined to a resolution of 1.3 Å, demonstrating that selenium can selectively substitute oxygen in DNA and that the resulting compounds are chemically stable. Since derivatization at the 2′-α-position with selenium does not affect the preference of the sugar for the C3′-endo conformation, this strategy is suitable for incorporating selenium into RNA. The availability of selenium-containing nucleic acids for crystallographic phasing offers an attractive alternative to the commonly used halogenated pyrimidins.

    Original languageEnglish (US)
    Pages (from-to)849-858
    Number of pages10
    JournalBiochimie
    Volume84
    Issue number9
    DOIs
    StatePublished - Sep 1 2002

    Keywords

    • Anomalous dispersion
    • DNA
    • MAD phasing
    • Nucleic acids
    • RNA
    • Selenium labeling
    • X-ray crystallography

    ASJC Scopus subject areas

    • Biochemistry

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