Artificially ambiguous genetic code confers growth yield advantage.

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Pezo V, Metzgar D, Hendrickson TL, Waas WF, Hazebrouck S, Doring V, Marliere P, Schimmel P, De Crecy-Lagard V

Artificially ambiguous genetic code confers growth yield advantage.

Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2004 Jun 8;101(23):8593-7. Epub 2004 May 26.

PubMed ID

15163798 [ View in PubMed

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Abstract

A primitive genetic code is thought to have encoded statistical, ambiguous proteins in which more than one amino acid was inserted at a given codon. The relative vitality of organisms bearing ambiguous proteins and the kinds of pressures that forced development of the highly specific modern genetic code are unknown. Previous work demonstrated that, in the absence of selective pressure, enforced ambiguity in cells leads to death or to sequence reversion to eliminate the ambiguous phenotype. Here, we report the creation of a nonreverting strain of bacteria that produced statistical proteins. Ablating the editing activity of isoleucyl-tRNA synthetase resulted in an ambiguous code in which, through supplementation of a limited supply of isoleucine with an alternative amino acid that was noncoding, the mutant generating statistical proteins was favored over the wild-type isogenic strain. Such organisms harboring statistical proteins could have had an enhanced adaptive capacity and could have played an important role in the early development of living systems.

DrugBank Data that Cites this Article

Drug Targets

Drug	Target	Kind	Organism	Pharmacological Action	Actions
Isoleucine	Isoleucine--tRNA ligase, cytoplasmic	Protein	Humans	Unknown	Not Available	Details