Nature Communications (Sep 2022)

A small molecule antagonist of SMN disrupts the interaction between SMN and RNAP II

  • Yanli Liu,
  • Aman Iqbal,
  • Weiguo Li,
  • Zuyao Ni,
  • Yalong Wang,
  • Jurupula Ramprasad,
  • Karan Joshua Abraham,
  • Mengmeng Zhang,
  • Dorothy Yanling Zhao,
  • Su Qin,
  • Peter Loppnau,
  • Honglv Jiang,
  • Xinghua Guo,
  • Peter J. Brown,
  • Xuechu Zhen,
  • Guoqiang Xu,
  • Karim Mekhail,
  • Xingyue Ji,
  • Mark T. Bedford,
  • Jack F. Greenblatt,
  • Jinrong Min

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-022-33229-5
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 13, no. 1
pp. 1 – 12

Abstract

Read online

The SMN protein recognizes symmetric dimethylarginine by its Tudor domain, and SMN deficiency leads to spinal muscular atrophy. Here, Liu et al. discover a small molecule that binds to the SMN Tudor domain and disrupts the interaction between SMN and RNA Polymerase II.