Data availabilityMaterials will be provided upon request. Ten cryo-EM maps and two sets of atomic coordinates have been deposited in the Electron Microscopy Data Bank (EMDB) and in the PDB. For RECC1: PDB 9DEI (atomic coordinates), corresponding to EMD-46791 (chimeric composite map), EMD-46785 (global consensus map), EMD-46786 (left-wing-focused refinement map), EMD-46787 (right-wing-focused refinement map) and EMD-46789 (tail-focused refinement map). For RECC2: PDB 9Z0H (atomic coordinates), corresponding to EMD-73706 (chimeric composite map), EMD-73703 (global consensus map), EMD-73704 (left-wing-focused refinement map) and EMD-73705 (right-wing-focused refinement map). For the RECC-conserved tRNA-binding region: EMD-73707 (tRNA-focused refinement map). MS datasets for protein identification (LC–MS/MS) and DSSO cross-linking (XL–MS) are available through ProteomeXchange under accession numbers PXD055091 and PXD068847, respectively. RNA-seq datasets from T. brucei are available in the NCBI Sequence Read Archive (SRA) under accession numbers PRJNA1081938 (tRNA-seq and RNA-seq), PRJNA1060865 (CLAP-seq) and PRJNA1182928 (L. tarentolae tRNA-seq). Database used in this study: TriTrypDB: https://tritrypdb.org/tritrypdb. Datasets used in this study: https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.16885363.v1; https://gtrnadb.ucsc.edu/GtRNAdb2/genomes/eukaryota/Lmajo2/; PDB 2NUG, 7R97 and 5T16; and GenBank M94286.1. Source data are provided with this paper.Code availability