Back

Triplex formation drives noncontiguous VIPR RNA-guided DNA recognition

Yoon, P. H.; Docter, T. A.; Zhang, Z.; Loi, K. J.; Valentin-Alvarado, L. E.; Brohawn, S. G.; Doudna, J. A.

2026-04-27 molecular biology
10.64898/2026.04.26.720927 bioRxiv
Show abstract

Viral Interference Programmable Repeat (VIPR) systems use a noncontiguous code for RNA-guided transcriptional silencing. How the Vipr protein and a vrRNA comprising alternating GGY and NN segments achieve precise DNA targeting is unknown. Here we present 21 cryo-electron microscopy structures that span the VIPR assembly pathway. Vipr protomers oligomerize along the vrRNA to form a right-handed helical filament, sequestering each GGY motif and positioning the adjacent NN bases for target base pairing. DNA binding, in which every third nucleotide is skipped, results in target strand rotation to form a gapped vrRNA-DNA hybrid helix that wraps around the non-target DNA strand to form a structural triplex. These findings provide the structural basis of noncontiguous RNA-guided DNA binding in VIPR, establishing triplex-driven target-strand handoff as an elegant mechanism of programmable nucleic acid recognition.

Matching journals

The top 4 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.

50% of probability mass above

"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.