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.

Further to 'off the shelf' translational inhibitors, with more of an eye to the recoding signals or flanking sequence, compound libraries have been screened and oligonucleotides synthesized. The best candidate from the initial screen for compounds targeting the 3 recoding signal for HIV frameshifting (683) was later shown to bind to a variety of RNA stem loops (684) . A new screen and subsequent modification has yielded a compound with much greater specificity, and yet causes a 50% increase in frameshifting (685) . Other approaches to increase specificity have been followed including recent modification of RNA binding peptides (686) . A detailed review on this topic is available (682) . Other studies have been on the pokeweed protein (687) and on ligand binding to a riboswitch (688) . The latter highlights the potential of frameshift stimulators as bricks in synthetic biology to engineer gene expression bifurcations.