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. Author manuscript; available in PMC: 2013 Jun 25.
Published in final edited form as: Cell. 2009 Feb 20;136(4):746–762. doi: 10.1016/j.cell.2009.01.036

Figure 3. Molecular recognition of cognate pairing interactions by T7 RNA polymerase and the ribosome.

Figure 3

(Left) T7 RNAP (green) recognizes correct base-pairs between RNA (yellow) and DNA (grey) by a “molecular-caliper” mechanism, wherein side groups of specific residues measure the invariant properties of the Watson-Crick base-pair geometry (PDB 1MSW) (Yin and Steitz, 2002). (Center) The type-I A minor interaction at the first base-pair between the codon and anticodon (PDB 2J00) (Selmer et al., 2006). (Right) Recognition of U1 of the UAA stop codon by release factor 1 (RF1) (PDB 3D5A) (Laurberg et al., 2008). All molecular representations were generated using PyMol (DeLano Scientific).