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.

The paucity of known occurrences of bypassing utilization was overturned by the 81 instances of the translational 'correction' of short blocks of nucleotide inserts in decoding mitochondrial mRNA of the yeast Magnusiomyces capitatus. Though involving an unused codon in the ribosomal A-site, this bypassing seems to be independent of the mRNA context and reflects a substantial relaxation of mitochondrial coding constraints (56, 65) . The absence of perfectly matched take-off and landing codons in several cases and perhaps a greater propensity for codon: anticodon dissociation, are likely related to relaxed wobble rules with two-out-of-three base pairing and features of mitochondrial ribosomes (56, 65) , for which earlier studies with Mycoplasma are relevant (412) . Studies of other bypass candidates (56, 217) are awaited.