A recent paper by Sirois et al. in The Journal of Experimental Medicine reports
that the receptor for advanced glycation end-products (RAGE) promotes uptake of
DNA into endosomes and lowers the immune recognition threshold for the
activation of Toll-like receptor 9. Two crystal structures suggested that the
DNA phosphate-deoxyribose backbone is recognized by RAGE through well-defined
interactions. However, the electron densities for the DNA molecules are weak
enough that the presented modeling of DNA is questionable, and models only
containing RAGE account for the observed diffraction data just as well as the
RAGE-DNA complexes presented by the authors.
