| Popis: |
The triphenylmethane dye, aurintricarboxylic acid (ATA), whose commonly accepted structure is shown in Figure 1, is a potent inhibitor of protein nucleic acid interactions. First employed by the metals industry for the quantitative determination of the aluminion ion (1), this dye in recent years has been utilized extensively by molecular biologists for the inhibition of a wide variety of important cellular processes that ultimately depend on the formation of a protein nucleic acid complex. Numerous studies employing both procaryotic (2–8) and eucaryotic systems (9–24) have clearly demonstrated that the initiation phase of protein synthesis is extraordinarily sensitive to the inhibitory action of ATA; by contrast, the subsequent step of chain elongation is much less sensitive to the dye. Two review articles (25–26) summarizing the inhibitory effects of ATA have been published. Commercial grade ATA also inhibits the synthesis of ppGpp (27), the poly rA, poly rC, and viral RNA directed DNA synthesis by detergent disrupted virions of Moloney murine leukemia virus (28), and the elaboration of progeny influenza virus (29). |
