Insights into the function of a novel RNA gene: HAR1.

摘要

With the sequencing of a plethora of mammalian genomes comes the overwhelming task of deciphering the functions of the DNA that does not get transcribed and translated to proteins. Non-coding RNAs have raised a lot of interest because of their capabilities to perform enzymatic reactions and regulate gene expression in various ways. Human Accelerated Region 1 (HAR1) has been identified as a RNA gene during a search for highly conserved regions in mammalian genomes, over one hundred base pairs long, and with high rates of substitution in the human genome. Its potential for coding for a protein is very minimal. However, the RNA that HAR1 codes for has been predicted computationally to have a stable secondary structure. Therefore it has been hypothesized that HAR1 is a RNA gene, exactly how it works and what it interacts with is unknown. Using macromolecular x-ray crystallography its three-dimensional structure has been explored. The final structure of this project resulted in a dimer. Whether or not this is a honest representation of HAR1 is impossible to know at this point due to the infancy of this project and the lack of knowledge about what HAR1 interacts with. From this project, it is hypothesized that HAR1 is non-coding RNA that interacts with a protein responsible for brain development through a series of bulged adenosines.