Preparations of hammerhead ribozymes for investigations of their cleavable sequences.

Recently, in hammerhead ribozymes, newly identified loop-loop interaction was found to be important for their activation. Therefore, we chemically synthesized a hammerhead ribozyme with this extra loop sequences and its mutant ribozymes, as well as their substrate RNA strands in order to clarify their cleavable sequences. After purification with an anion exchange column chromatography, we were able to obtain 44mer and 20mer RNA.