Post-transcriptional modifications to tRNA—a response to the genetic code degeneracy
- Ya-Ming Hou1,
- Howard Gamper1 and
- Wei Yang2
- 1Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Thomas Jefferson University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19107, USA
- 2Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, Florida State University, Tallahassee, Florida 32306-4390, USA
- Corresponding author: ya-ming.hou{at}jefferson.edu
This extract was created in the absence of an abstract.
We used to think of the genetic code degeneracy as an obligatory process resulting from assigning 61 sense codons to the 20 amino acids in protein. In this degeneracy, 18 of the 20 amino acids are endowed with multiple codons, and the conventional wisdom was that each of the 18 was translated equally from each codon. However, due to the degeneracy mostly manifest at the wobble position for each amino acid, we were led to believe that the degeneracy is simply to provide a deck of codons for safety control, in case one or two codons are damaged by nucleotide substitutions to the wobble position. However, work over a long path has now shown that the degeneracy has a much deeper meaning, with the ability to confer codon-by-codon translational regulation.
At its core, translation of a codon requires pairing interaction with the anticodon of its cognate tRNA. Due to the …
