RNA-protein UV-crosslinking Assay

RNA-protein interactions play a crucial role in every aspect of RNA metabolism, and also plays a major role in post-transcriptional gene regulation. RNA-binding proteins have been implicated in viral gene expression (Ray and Das, 2002) and microRNA-mediated gene regulation (Poria et al., 2016). Here we have described the protocol which (1) covalently links transiently interacting RNA-protein complexes by UV crosslinking, (2) removes the unprotected RNA by RNase digestion and (3) detects the RNA-protein complexes by SDS-PAGE analysis. This protocol provides a rapid and reliable means to directly assay RNA-protein interactions and their kinetics using purified proteins and also help in identifying novel RNA-protein interactions.