A Sparse Matrix Approach to Crystallizing Ribozymes and RNA Motifs

With the discovery of RNA catalysts and the role of RNA in many essential biological processes, our need to learn the fundamentals of RNA structure has become acute. X-ray crystallography is the only means available to determine the three-dimensional structure of many biologically interesting RNAs owing to their size. To begin an RNA crystallography project, one needs to synthesize milligram quantities of homogeneous RNA, as described in Chapters 38 and 39 .