Chemistry of Catalysis
The hammerhead ribozyme carries out a very simple chemical reaction that results in the breakage of the substrate strand of RNA, specifically at C17, the cleavage-site nucleotide. Although RNA cleavage is often referred to as hydrolysis, the mechanism employed does not in fact involve the addition of water. Rather, the cleavage reaction is simply an isomerization that consists of rearrangement of the linking phosphodiester bond. It is the same reaction, chemically, that occurs with random base-mediated RNA degradation, except that it is highly site-specific and the rate is accelerated 10,000-fold or more.
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