In recent years, many diverse classes of RNA have been discovered, and it has become clear that these species play a wide range of roles in cellular metabolism. Protein tools to track and manipulate RNA would be of great use both in research and potentially as therapeutics. We are currently testing the hypothesis that zinc-finger domains can act as a suitable scaffold with which to design RNA-binding proteins with programmable specificity.1 I will describe our progress to date in this area, including our efforts to structurally and functionally characterize the new protein domains that we have designed.