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The Role And Fate Of Branch Site-U2 Snrna Interaction During Pre-Mrna Splicing, Duncan Smith

Student Theses and Dissertations

Many details of the conformational dynamics underlying transitions during premRNA splicing, particularly during the catalytic phase, remain unclear despite our deep knowledge of spliceosome composition. The complex assembly phase that precedes catalysis, and the involvement of several motifs in multiple interactions along the splicing pathway, exacerbate the difficulty of accessing splicing catalysis experimentally. snRNAs likely form some or all of the spliceosomal active site. We attempted to establish an snRNA-only splicing system as a means to bypass assembly and recapitulate splicing catalysis. Our approach, however, yielded a 2’-3’ bondforming ribozyme activity in a linker region in our fused snRNA construct; …