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.

However, a different type of example is the combination of a 'savior' indel together with a low level of compensatory frameshifting. For example, an indel that adds or deletes a G in a run of 7Gs in herpes virus thymidine kinase mRNA prevents susceptibility to a common antiviral drug. A very low level of frameshifting in decoding the run of Gs yields sufficient product to allow reactivation from latency but not enough to activate the drug inhibitory pathway (5,6) review (7) ('savior' being from the virus, and not the patient's, perspective). With 'compensatory' frameshifting, in general, the non-shift derived product is useless and degraded. Though use of the words corrective or compensatory would be questionable, from a mechanistic and practical perspective, the ability of a high proportion of ribosomes to simply ignore a synthetic unnatural base, and continue translation as if the base were not present (8) , is also pertinent.