Genetic and crystallographic approaches to investigating ribosome structure and function

Abstract

The past decade has seen tremendous advances in our understanding of the mechanism of protein synthesis, due in part to the solution of ribosome structures by X-ray crystallography. These structures have clarified our view of the decoding process so that it can now be understood in stereochemical terms, and have demonstrated that the ribosome is a ribozyme, catalyzing peptide bond formation using RNA's capacity to adopt complex three-dimensional arrangements. While the ribosome structure solutions represent fundamental technical achievements, perhaps their most important contribution is that they explain some four decades of genetic and biochemical studies of the ribosome. It could perhaps be said with only slight exaggeration that little about the ribosome makes sense except in the light of its three-dimensional structure.