E. Shyam P. Reddy, Professor and Director of the Cancer Biology Program, Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Morehouse School of Medicine, shared a post on LinkedIn:
“A new study finds that at least one Archaea has surprisingly flexibility when interpreting genetic code, which goes against a long-held rule of biology.
While codons (combinations of three nucleotides) may vary in which do what functions, a long-standing rule was that each codon serves one specific purpose.
New evidence, however suggests that onemicrobe sometimes uses the codon UGA as a stop codon and sometimes use it to code for the amino acid pyrrolysine.
The discovery of this “loosey-goosey” translation could help scientists better understand archaea in our bodies and improve treatments of diseases.
The building blocks of life are formed from a simple process: DNA is transcribed into RNA, which then becomes proteins. And all life follows the same instructions for how those proteins form—instructions based on 61 codons made of three nucleotides, all of which are combinations of the four nucleic acids named adenine (A), cytosine (C), guanine (G), and uracil (U).
These codons are typically assigned either to one of the 20 canonical amino acids or to what’s known as a stop codon (usually UAA, UAG, or UGA), the latter of which sends a signal to terminate protein-building and release the polypeptide chain. For decades, scientists have assumed that this process needs to be exact.
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