Talk:Hammerhead ribozyme

Catalysis section
It would be good to have a section on catalysis. Any volunteers? Alexbateman 16:43, 14 May 2007 (UTC)


 * I'm on it (gradually). Wgscott 17:37, 17 June 2007 (UTC)

Great work Wgscott!

Species distribution
Is this in the right place? It looks a bit thin now compared to Wgscott contributions. Perhaps it needs to be put in a table instead. Alexbateman 08:31, 18 June 2007 (UTC)

Sequence alignment
It would be good to add a multiple sequence alignment to highlight the most conserved sequence motifs. This could go in the Primary and secondary structure section. Alexbateman 08:31, 18 June 2007 (UTC)

Please, add it.

This is still a work in progress. I still have to work on the figure labels and captions (including the fist figure -- I was trying to figure out the various pre-formatted boxes) and I have a bunch of references and links that must still be added. A whole section on open problems is unwritten, and the whole thing could benefit from some editing. I just wanted to get some stuff in place, and will continue work when I return to town (about a week). Wgscott 15:08, 18 June 2007 (UTC)


 * OK I'll work out how to get a good format sequence alignment figure done. When you come to add in references you'll find this tool an invaluable time saver: http://diberri.dyndns.org/wikipedia/templates/?type=pmid&id=17452784&extended=1&add_param_space=1&add_ref_tag=1

Cheers. Alexbateman 15:15, 18 June 2007 (UTC)

I've done a zero-th order merge of the other hammerhead sequence pages of yours, but I would love to have you improve it. Wgscott 03:00, 25 June 2007 (UTC)
 * OK I've had a go at merging these in. Alexbateman 12:49, 25 June 2007 (UTC)

Also, I've used a bogus tax box for the first image, but if you (we) could make a new type along the lines of what you have for the sequence, it would be great. Wgscott 03:00, 25 June 2007 (UTC)

Non-ribozyme catalysis?
Are there any known/suspected examples of RNA catalysis that isn't a ribozyme? I didn't see anything in a quick Google search didn't turn up anything, but.. well, it's Google.. Jimw338 (talk) 23:47, 20 December 2016 (UTC)

Needs a better introduction
What does this thing actually do? The introduction states that it "self-cleaves", but what does that mean? That if you bring two identical ribozyme molecules together, one will cut the other into two pieces? Or that a single molecule will spontaneously react with itself and fall apart? In any case, what is the biological point of producing a substance whose only function is to catalyze its own destruction -- how does an organism benefit from having something like that around? And how would the "therapeutic applications" hinted at the end work? How would it contribute towards curing a disease to introduce a molecule that destroys itself? –Henning Makholm (talk) 14:48, 5 August 2010 (UTC)
 * Good points! I think that the reason for many of these ribozymes catalysing a cleavage reaction is that they come from things called viroids, which are small virus like molecules which have a circular genome.  The hammerhead ribozyme cleaves the concatenated versions of their RNA genome into viroid genome sized bits.  In terms of the therapeutic applications it is possible to make artificial ribozymes that can bind and cleave messenger RNAs in the cell and cleave them helping to switch off genes that could be harmful. What is clever is that one can design hammerhead ribozymes to target any gene. I hope that is reasonably clear. I guess I just need to turn that into some text with references and put it in.  Thanks Alexbateman (talk) 15:36, 5 August 2010 (UTC)

In-line transition state image
It would be great if there were a better image. In particular, one with a more complete and correct "curly arrow" electron transfer mechanism would be great, but maybe that's the chemist in me speaking...If I can find a good free chemistry editor I'll give it a go. Sarahburge (talk) 15:48, 28 March 2011 (UTC)
 * I am sorry it took me so long to sort this out. I have improved the curly arrow representation but have kept the majority of the previous image caption which I thought was good. Sarahburge (talk) 12:24, 13 May 2011 (UTC)

Biological function and applications
Just a note to myself and others that it would be good to include subsections on the biological function of naturally-occurring hammerheads, and on the use of hammerheads for selective RNA inactivation in cells and animals. --John Mackenzie Burke (talk) 18:43, 23 January 2013 (UTC)

Reference(s) to PDB structure(s)
Please cite the PDB structure(s) upon which images and structure-function relationship descriptions are based. Argantael (talk) 11:38, 29 August 2016 (UTC)