A Caged Uridine for the Selective Preparation of an RNA Fold and Determination of its Refolding Kinetics by Real‐Time NMR

Abstract

By introducing a photolabile group at the Watson–Crick base-pairing site of a uridine residue, a bistable 20-base RNA sequence was forced into a single conformation. A single laser pulse released the native sequence, and the subsequent refolding equilibration was monitored with time-resolved NMR spectroscopy. This leads to a quantitative description of the refolding process.