Ribozymes Essay -- Biology, Catalytic Molecules, RNA

Ribozymes are catalytic molecules that stay put the ribonucleic acid (ribonucleic acid) at specific sequences (Gesteland et al. 2006). RNA is the nucleic acid that is made in the process of transcription when the deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) anneals, it transcribes itself into a linear stranded molecule c everyed RNA. In order for RNA to synthesize proteins, it requires catalytic enzymes to perform certain chemic substance reactions. In the past, it was thought that all chemical reactions are catalysed by protein enzymes however, in the eighties this hypothesis was disproved as Thomas Cech and Sydney Altman discovered that RNA is able to carry place self-catalysing activities which were named as ribozymes because they perform similar functions as the protein enzymes (Jaeger, 1997). Even though, RNA ribozymes lack the practicable groups diversity found in protein enzymes, they are able to carry out their own catalytic reactions due to their tendency to fold into a 3D structure an d form helices by Watson-Crick base pairing role (Kiehntopf et al. 1995). Ribozymes are now play critical role in the understanding of biochemistry, as they energise the ability to catalyse some of the most important chemical reactions such as RNA splicing as well as the synthesis of peptides, for instance ribozymes can speed up the phosphoryl transfer chemical reactions by 1011 folds. This review will describe the structure, sources and applications of ribozymes. There are several(prenominal) inwroughtly occurring ribozymes that have been identified to date these are divided into 3 distinct classes. Firstly, the self splicing introns that fall into groups I and II on an individual basis depending on their structure and the recognition sequences. Self splicing group I intron was the first ribozyme to b... ...the cells, the localisation of the ribozymes in the cells as well as the selection site of the messengerRNA (James and Gibson, 1998). Ribozymes are currently considered to hold many promises for the time to come development of cistron therapy as they have the ability to splice and cleave any engineer RNA sequences. There are seven natural ribozymes known and several artificial ribozymes have been created. These artificial ribozymes are macrocosm used as therapeutic agent to target the aberrant gene expression in many lethal diseases such as cancer. The terminal point of artificial ribozymes is mainly due to the difficulty in their delivery to the target cells. Therefore, more research needs to be conducted in thoroughly study the organisation and structures of the natural RNA ribozymes to achieve successful artificial ribozymes that have complex function in the future.