Live-cell single RNA imaging reveals bursts of translational frameshifting

Kenneth Lyon; Luis U. Aguilera; Tatsuya Morisaki; Brian Munsky; Timothy J. Stasevich

Frameshifting is a fundamental biological process in which a ribosome translating an RNA slips by +/-1 nucleotides, resulting in the translation of an entirely different peptide sequence from that point forward. While frameshifting is generally detrimental to protein fidelity (Belew et al., 2014; Choi et al., 2015) , the process effectively creates two distinct proteins from a single RNA (Clark et al., 2007; Meydan et al., 2017; Yordanova et al., 2015) . Viruses exploit this aspect of frameshifting to minimize their genomes and to successfully replicate in host cells (Brierley and Dos Ramos, 2006; Brierley et al., 1989; Caliskan et al., 2015; Cardno et al., 2015; Mouzakis et al., 2013) . A prototypical example is HIV, which utilizes frameshifting to translate the gag-pol proteins from a single viral RNA (Guerrero et al., 2015) .