Fig. 1.
(A) RNA sequences of the hammerhead ribozyme and the FAM-labeled substrate RNA used in this study. (B) The polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis for the ribozyme reaction for 30 min with 10 mM MgCl2 or 0, 0.5, 1.0, or 1.5 M NaCl. The arrowheads indicate the uncleaved (upper) and cleaved (lower) fragments of the substrate RNA. The reactions with NaCl in the presence of PEG200 (P2h) or PEG8000 (P8k) at 20 wt% are also presented. (C) Changes in the reaction rate constant by the addition of PEG of different molecular weights, expressed as the ratio of the rate constants with (kPEG) and without PEG (knone), in the solutions containing 1.5 M (circles) or 0.5 M NaCl (triangles). (D) The NaCl concentration dependence of k in the absence (black) and presence of PEG200 (blue), PEG600 (cyan), PEG2000 (orange), PEG8000 (red), or PEG20000 (green) at 20 wt%. The correlation coefficients of a linear fit are greater than 0.995. (For interpretation of the references to color in this figure legend, the reader is referred to the web version of this article.)