Specific chemical approaches for studying mammalian ribosomes complexed with ligands involved in selenoprotein synthesis

Chemical approaches are very powerful tools for investigating the molecular structure and architecture of large ribonucleoprotein complexes involving ribosomes and other components of the translation system. Application of RNA nucleotide-specific and cross-linking reagents of a broad specificity range allows the researcher to obtain information on the sites of ligand binding to the ribosome and to each other as well as on the RNA rearrangements caused by the binding. Here, we describe specific chemical approaches including chemical probing and site-directed or bifunctional reagent-mediated cross-linking, which have been used for exploring the mechanism of selenocysteine insertion into a polypeptide chain by mammalian ribosomes.