Abstract
Mitochondria are intracellular organelles in eukaryotic cells that have their own genome and translational apparatus. The vertebrate mitochondrial decoding system is thought to be the simplest among all extant living systems and to have originated by retrogression from the universal decoding system, induced mainly by genome economisation and directional mutation pressure during mitochondrial evolution. Thus, it is reasonable to speculate that the vertebrate genetic code table is a typical model for the early genetic code table.
In some metazoan mitochondrial decoding systems, it was found that unmodified anticodons of tRNA have the potential to base-pair with cognate codons and retain flexibility at the wobble pair, suggesting that the early decoding system consisted of unmodified RNA prior to the emergence of RNA-modifying systems. Competition would likely have occurred between G34-tRNA having GNN anticodons and U34-tRNA having UNN anticodons (or C34-tRNA having CNN anticodons for AUR codons) in their binding to the ribosomal A site, which would have resulted in the discrimination between NNY codons and NNR codons in the two-codon sets. Thus, the early genetic code table would have been established in such a way that eight family box codons were deciphered by U34-tRNA, and eight NNY and six NNR codons in the two-codon sets were deciphered by G34-tRNA and U34-tRNA (or C34-tRNA), respectively.
This review describes the characteristics of an early decoding system inferred from the genetic code of present vertebrate mitochondria, and how the present universal decoding system may have originated from the early decoding system during evolutionary history.
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Acknowledgements
We thank Dr. Tsutomu Suzuki of the University of Tokyo for supplying us with analytical data of mitochondrial tRNAs and his wholehearted support of this study. We also thank Dr. Akira Muto, Hirosaki University, for Mycoplasma ribosome data, and Dr. Takeo Suzuki, University of Tokyo, for E. coli tRNA data.
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Watanabe, K., Yokobori, Si. (2014). How the Early Genetic Code Was Established?: Inference from the Analysis of Extant Animal Mitochondrial Decoding Systems. In: Erdmann, V., Markiewicz, W., Barciszewski, J. (eds) Chemical Biology of Nucleic Acids. RNA Technologies. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-54452-1_2
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