The 5'-termini of bacterial RNA. I. The monophosphorylated termini

A two-dimensional fingerprint technique is described which separated oligonucleotides by length and number of phosphates present at the termini. The diversity of terminal nucleotide sequences was found to be quite restricted in bacterial 4-5 S RNA: in the strain used here the predominant dinucleotide species was pG-C, and the only trinucleotides produced were pG-G-Up and pG-G-Cp. Examination of total pulse-labeled RNA revealed the same restricted set of terminal trinucleotides.