Ribosomal frameshifting and transcriptional slippage: From genetic steganography and cryptography to adventitious use

Atkins, John F.; Loughran, Gary; Bhatt, Pramod R.; Firth, Andrew E.; Baranov, Pavel V.

Several examples will be used to illustrate frameshifting in central regions of coding sequences. No ORF overlap is involved where ribosomes encounter a stop codon as the first codon in the new frame; the frameshift-derived product lacks C-terminal 'domain(s)' present in the product of standard translation. Where the efficiency of transition to the alternative frame is close to 50%, a single nucleotide change can reverse the roles with longer product being derived from frameshifting almost at the end of the ORF yielding the shorter product. An example is bacterial dnaX, see below, which illustrates the relevance of efficiency to location. With D. melanogaster APC, the new frame encodes a functionally significant C-terminal segment that of course differs from that of the product of standard decoding, though they share the same N-terminal segment (46) .