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. Author manuscript; available in PMC: 2009 Oct 21.
Published in final edited form as: Nature. 2008 Dec 18;456(7224):921–926. doi: 10.1038/nature07666

Figure 3. Conformational changes within the bilobal Ago scaffold on proceeding from the binary (guide) complex to the ternary (guide + target) complex.

Figure 3

a, b, The nucleic acid binding canyon changes width on proceeding from the binary (a) to the ternary (b) complex. The Ago protein is shown in a space-filling representation with labelled domains and linkers colour-coded as in Fig. 1. The guide DNA (red) and target RNA (blue) are shown in stick representation with backbone phosphorus atoms in yellow. c, View of alignment of binary (cyan) and ternary (magenta) Ago complexes, after superpositioning of their PIWI-containing modules. The red arrows indicate the magnitude of the conformational changes on proceeding from binary to ternary complexes.