Leaderless genes in bacteria: clue to the evolution of translation initiation mechanisms in prokaryotes
Backgrounds Translation is a key process highly conserved in the biological system. However, translation initiation shows great variation in the three kingdoms. In eukaryotes, the ribosome binds at the 5-end of the capped mRNA and slides downstream to find the first start codon and then initiate the translation, which is the so-called scanning mechanism. In prokaryotes, there are two known mechanisms. The Shine-Dalgarno (SD) initiation mechanism was found early in Escherichia. Coli. For this mechanism, a short motif called SD sequence in the 5-untranslated region (5UTR) on mRNA binds with the 3-end of 16S rRNA on the ribosome and helps the ribosome directly identify the translation initiation site (TIS). The other one, namely leaderless initiation, was found in λ-phage of E. Coli. In this case, the mRNA lacks a 5-UTR and hence has no SD sequence in it, thus the start codon itself serves as the most important signal for the translation initiation.
Xiaobin Zheng Gang-Qing Hu Huaiqiu Zhu
Department of Biomedical Engineering,College of Engineering,and Center for Theoretical Biology, Peki National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, NIH, Bethesda, MD 20892, USA Department of Biomedical Engineering, College of Engineering, and Center for Theoretical Biology, Pe
国际会议
杭州
英文
120-123
2010-10-01（万方平台首次上网日期，不代表论文的发表时间）