Figure 9.

The full YagL protein is required for it to accelerate re-folding of the Tetrahymena ribozyme. a two-step catalytic activity assay was performed by pre-incubating the ribozyme into a misfolded state and then adding different concentrations of the ‘dHTH’ or the ‘HTH’ protein truncations. The full length YagL protein was used as a positive control. Reactions were stopped at different times, after which radiolabeled rSA5 was added to perform substrate cleavage reactions. The fraction of cleaved product was quantified and used to generate plots of the fraction of native ribozyme as a function of folding time. Error bars represent the variation between experimental duplicates. Only the full YagL protein was capable of significantly accelerating re-folding of the ribozyme, as evidenced by the rapid increase in fraction of native ribozyme at earlier time points (red) compared to the buffer only control (blue).