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Figure 5 | BMC Bioinformatics

Figure 5

From: The ancient history of the structure of ribonuclease P and the early origins of Archaea

Figure 5

The evolutionary history of the structure of RNase P. (A) Trees of molecular substructures were reconstructed from characters describing the geometry of RPR structure. The tree of stem substructures of Figure 3 is shown with branches colored according to node distance (nd). The same ancestry color scale was used to paint a schematic drawing of the secondary structure of a consensus RPR, with stems drawn as thick lines and loops as circles. This evolutionary heat map describes the relative addition of fundamental structural components to the evolving molecule. (B) Top and lateral views of the RNase P ternary complex, using a model described in ribbons format based on Buck et al. [69]. The interaction of RPR with tRNA and RPP molecules is shown. (C) Same top and lateral views of the RPR molecule with the relative ages of RPR substructures mapped onto the 3D model. Note how the RPP interacts with the ancient P2 and P3 stems, and laterally with the P4 pseudoknot, and how the top half of tRNA makes crucial contacts with the base of the most ancient substructure, the P12 stem. The RPR and RPP structure is from Bacillus [58, 70].

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