Unexpected anisotropy in substrate cleavage rates by asymmetric hammerhead ribozymes

RNA substrates which form relatively short helices I and III with hammerhead ribozymes are generally cleaved more rapidly than substrates which create longer binding helices. We speculated that for optimum cleavage rates, one of the helices needed to be relatively weak. To identify this helix, a series of ribozymes and substrates of varying lengths were made such that in the complex, helices I and III consisted of 5 and 10 bp respectively or vice versa. In two independent systems, substrates in the complexes with the shorter helix I and longer helix III were cleaved one to two orders of magnitude more rapidly than those in the complexes with the longer helix I and shorter helix III. Similar results were obtained whether the numbers of base pairs in helices I and III were limited either by the length of the hybridizing arms of the ribozyme or the length of the substrate. The phenomenon was observed for both all-RNA and DNA armed ribozymes. Thus, a relatively short helix I is required for fast cleavage rates in pre-formed hammer-head ribozyme-substrate complexes. When helix III has 10 bp, the optimum length for helix I is approximately 5 bp.