Not to be confused with uridine, thymidine, or thymine.

The chemical compound 5-methyluridine (symbol m5U or m5U), also called ribothymidine (rT)[footnote 1], is a pyrimidine nucleoside. It is the ribonucleoside counterpart to the deoxyribonucleoside thymidine, which lacks a hydroxyl group at the 2' position. 5-Methyluridine contains a thymine base joined to a ribose pentose sugar.[4] It is a white solid.

m5U is one of the most common modifications made to cellular RNA. It almost universally occurs in position 54 (part of the T arm) of eukaryotic and bacterial tRNA, serving to stabilize the molecule. The same "T-loop" motif occurs in many other forms of noncoding RNA such as tmRNA and rRNA. Loss of the tRNA modification does not usually produce a different, less fit, phenotype.[5]

See also

Footnotes

  1. ^ The term ribothymidine is especially used to describe its unusual occurrence in RNA.[3]

References

  1. ^ "5-Methyluridine". ChemSpider. Retrieved December 6, 2018.
  2. ^ William M. Haynes (2016). CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics (97th ed.). Boca Raton: CRC Press. p. 3-400. ISBN 978-1-4987-5429-3.
  3. ^ Lehninger Principles of Biochemistry (6th ed.). W. H. Freeman and Company. 2013. p. 282. ISBN 9781429234146.
  4. ^ Shobbir Hussain (2019). "Catalytic crosslinking-based methods for enzyme-specified profiling of RNAribonucleotide modifications". Methods. 156: 60–65. doi:10.1016/j.ymeth.2018.10.003. PMID 30308313. S2CID 52961265.
  5. ^ Powell, CA; Minczuk, M (April 2020). "TRMT2B is responsible for both tRNA and rRNA m(5)U-methylation in human mitochondria". RNA Biology. 17 (4): 451–462. doi:10.1080/15476286.2020.1712544. PMC 7237155. PMID 31948311.