Functional and structural inter-relationships of RNA and proteins in the execution and
control of biological processes such as RNA processing, RNA splicing, and translation are
increasingly apparent. In this minireview, I present an RNA chaperone hypothesis, which
fosters the view that constraints imposed by fundamental problems in the folding of RNA
have profoundly influenced the nature of RNA/protein interactions in biology. The origin of
this view is outlined as follows. RNA has two fundamental folding problems: a tendency to …