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.

While this section has illustrated the wide variety of intra-mRNA structural frameshift stimulators, a reminder of specificity comes from the numbers of modest mutational changes that greatly reduce frameshift enhancement. Further, an illustration of the potential for an effect of mutations very close to a 3 structural stimulator not necessarily reflecting the structure directly but perhaps an interrelationship of 3 stimulators comes from a study of the alphavirus, Middelburg virus, that uses a 3 pseudoknot frameshift stimulator (potentially with a 7-bp stem 2). This analysis was provoked by the study described at the start of the next section below, on a different alphavirus (as mentioned above the frameshifting in different alphaviruses uses diverse stimulators (137, 140) ) ( Figure 15 ).