Insights into the structural basis of RNA recognition by STAR domain proteins.

STAR proteins regulate diverse cellular processes and control numerous developmental events. They function at the post-transcriptional level by regulating the stability, sub-cellular distribution, alternative splicing, or translational efficiency of specific mRNA targets. Significant effort has been expended to define the determinants of RNA recognition by STAR proteins, in hopes of identifying new mRNA targets that contribute their role in cellular metabolism and development. This work has lead to the extensive biochemical characterization of the nucleotide sequence specificity of a handful of STAR proteins. In contrast, little structural information is available to analyze the molecular basis of sequence specific RNA recognition by this protein family. This chapter reviews the relevant literature on STAR domain protein structure, and provides insights into how these proteins discriminate between different RNA sequences.

STAR蛋白调控多种细胞过程并控制众多发育事件。它们通过调节特定mRNA靶点的稳定性、亚细胞分布、可变剪接或翻译效率在转录后水平发挥作用。为了确定STAR蛋白识别RNA的决定因素，人们付出了巨大努力，希望识别出在细胞代谢和发育中起作用的新的mRNA靶点。这项工作已经对少数几种STAR蛋白的核苷酸序列特异性进行了广泛的生化表征。相比之下，可用于分析该蛋白家族序列特异性识别RNA的分子基础的结构信息却很少。本章回顾了有关STAR结构域蛋白结构的相关文献，并深入探讨了这些蛋白如何区分不同的RNA序列。