L-arginine recognition by yeast arginyl-tRNA synthetase.
Cavarelli, J., Delagoutte, B., Eriani, G., Gangloff, J., Moras, D.(1998) EMBO J 17: 5438-5448
- PubMed: 9736621 
- DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/emboj/17.18.5438
- Primary Citation of Related Structures:  
1BS2 - PubMed Abstract: 
The crystal structure of arginyl-tRNA synthetase (ArgRS) from Saccharomyces cerevisiae, a class I aminoacyl-tRNA synthetase (aaRS), with L-arginine bound to the active site has been solved at 2.75 A resolution and refined to a crystallographic R-factor of 19.7%. ArgRS is composed predominantly of alpha-helices and can be divided into five domains, including the class I-specific active site. The N-terminal domain shows striking similarity to some completely unrelated proteins and defines a module which should participate in specific tRNA recognition. The C-terminal domain, which is the putative anticodon-binding module, displays an all-alpha-helix fold highly similar to that of Escherichia coli methionyl-tRNA synthetase. While ArgRS requires tRNAArg for the first step of the aminoacylation reaction, the results show that its presence is not a prerequisite for L-arginine binding. All H-bond-forming capability of L-arginine is used by the protein for the specific recognition. The guanidinium group forms two salt bridge interactions with two acidic residues, and one H-bond with a tyrosine residue; these three residues are strictly conserved in all ArgRS sequences. This tyrosine is also conserved in other class I aaRS active sites but plays several functional roles. The ArgRS structure allows the definition of a new framework for sequence alignments and subclass definition in class I aaRSs.
Organizational Affiliation: 
UPR 9004 Biologie Structurale, Institut de G¨¦n¨¦tique et de Biologie Mol¨¦culaire et Cellulaire, CNRS/INSERM/ULP, BP 163, 67404 Illkirch Cedex, France.