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.

Classical pausing studies revealed a complicated picture. Several early studies investigated the relationship between pausing and frameshifting (78, 80, 585) . One major paper on infectious bronchitis virus frameshifting concluded that ribosomal pausing at a frameshifter RNA pseudoknot is sensitive to reading phase but shows little correlation with frameshift efficiency (107) . In several cases 3 structures that do not stimulate frameshifting cause similar pausing (78, 107, 585) (a subset of these were mutants of stimulatory structures). With the IBV pseudoknot, optical tweezer results reporting a correlation between the force for mechanical unwinding and stimulatory effectiveness (586) were later challenged (541) . [A different situation pertains with simpler stem loop stimulators.] High resolution ribosome profiling of infected cells has just been performed but at the resolution of the technique no pausing at the frameshift site was detected though it was detected at other positions in the coding sequence (105) . Few studies have focused on structural features that may influence ribosomes in a different way, but one is of an isolated luteoviral frameshift stimulatory pseudoknot. This work suggested that a segment not central to pseudoknot stability may influence frameshifting by direct interaction with ribosome components (524) .