Significant Role of the Superhelical Motion of TALE in DNA Recognition

Abstract

Transcriptional Activator-Like Effector (TALE) proteins have become focused as designable DNA-targeting tool. TALEs comprise of a tandem array of TAL-repeats, each of which repeat recognizes a specific single base-pair. TALE is, thus, designed to bind at any predefined genomic site by crafting an array of TAL-repeats to recognize DNA sequence typically in 17 base-pair long. Fusion of TALE to a protein module produces an orthogonal gene-targeting modifier, including TALE-nuclease (TALEN) in genome editing. In spite of prevailing TALEs applications, it still remains elusive how TALE proteins recognize DNA sequence. Here, we review the biophysical aspects of TALE-DNA interactions.