Scientists develop new chemical tool to study RNA structures inside cells

Robert Spitale, assistant professor of pharmaceutical sciences, Filipp Furche, professor of chemistry, doctoral student Dalen Chan, postdoctoral scholar Chao Feng and colleagues describe their study results in an advance online publication on the Nature Chemical Biology website.

Many RNA functions are controlled by the formation of specific structures, so it's important that scientists understand each component, particularly when it comes to cancer prevention research. "If structures are wrong, they can cause diseases," Chan noted.

Currently, Spitale said, "there are only a handful of indirect methods used to explore RNA motifs -- and most of those only work outside cells."

The novel chemical tool developed by the UCI team lets biologists study RNA components, such as binding proteins and binding sites, inside cells in a controllable manner. "The structures react with the chemical probe, allowing us to re-create them based on the chemistry we discover," Feng explained.

The researchers are working on additional tools utilizing this technique to examine the structures of thousands of RNA molecules in parallel through deep sequencing.