Nonsense suppressor
A nonsense suppressor is a factor which can inhibit the effect of the nonsense mutation. Nonsense suppressors can be generally divided into two classes: a) a mutated tRNA which can bind with a termination codon on mRNA; b) a mutation on ribosomes decreasing the effect of a termination codon. It's believed that nonsense suppressors keep a low concentration in the cell and do not disrupt normal translation most of the time. In addition, many genes do not have only one termination codon, and cells commonly use ochre codons as the termination signal, whose nonsense suppressors are usually inefficient.[1][2][3]
Nonsense suppressor is a useful genetic tool, but can also result in problematic side effects, since all identical stop codons in the genome will also be suppressed to the same degree. Genes with different or multiple stop codons will be unaffected.
SUP35, a nonsense suppressor identified by Wickner in 1994, is a prion protein.
In synthetic biology, artificial suppressor tRNAs are used to incorporate unnatural amino acids at nonsense codons placed in the coding sequence of a gene.[4]
References
- ^ David L. Nelson; et al. (2013). Principles of Biochemistry (vol. 3). New York, NY: W. H. Freeman and Company. p. 1134. ISBN 978-1-4292-3414-6.
{{cite book}}: Explicit use of et al. in:|author=(help) - ^ Hartwell, Leland; L. Hood; M. Goldberg; A. Reynolds; L. Silver; R. Veres (2004). Genetics: From Genes to Genomes. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill. p. 267. ISBN 978-0-07-246248-7.
- ^ "Nonsense suppressors". San Diego State University.
- ^ Young, Douglas D; Schultz, Peter G (2018). "Playing with the Molecules of Life". Acs Chemical Biology. 13 (4): 854–870. doi:10.1021/acschembio.7b00974. PMC 6061972. PMID 29345901.
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