2023.01.23
Lost in Translation: How “Risky” Amino Acids Abort Elongation in Protein Synthesis
Elongation, a crucial step in the translation process of protein synthesis, gets disrupted by amino acid sequences with an abundance of N-terminal aspartic and glutamic acid residues in eukaryotic cells, discovered researchers from Tokyo Tech and University of Hyogo. The team’s findings show that these “risky” amino acids can destabilize the ribosomal machinery. As a consequence, most proteomes tend to avoid incorporating them at the N-terminals of peptide sequences, indicating a bias in amino acid distribution.
