Supplementary Figure 10: Interaction between the crRNA nucleobase in position 1 and Thr16 of the AsCpf1 WED domain.
From: In vivo high-throughput profiling of CRISPR–Cpf1 activity
The hydroxyl side chain of the Thr16 residue in the WED domain shows a polar interaction with the N2 of a guanine base (blue dotted line inside the red circle). Similar polar interactions with this Thr16 residue may be formed with side chains of other nucleobases such as the O2 of thymine and uracil. Due to the lack of a corresponding moiety in adenine, however, the positioning of a crRNA adenine ribonucleobase in this site could be unstable, consequently resulting in an unfavorable positioning of thymine at position 1 of the target DNA strand, which is next to the PAM motif. There is a complementary interaction between the crRNA ribonucleotide (guanine is shown here) and the target sequence nucleotide (cytosine at position 1 is shown here). The figure is drawn based on the published data of ref. 17 (PDB 5B43).
