Abstract
Up to this point the discussion has focused on events in which the reading frame shifts between overlapping codons. However, shifts can occur in larger increments, up to as many as 50 nt. Such an event is termed a translational hop. Translational hopping was first observed in synthetic constructs made to test the sequence requirements of frameshifts in E. coli. Hopping occurred by re-pairing of tRNAs on cognate or near cognate codons shifted +2 to +6.39 All of these events were very inefficient, occurring with apparent efficiencies of only from 0.4 to 1%. More recently, extremely efficient translational hops have been identified in phage T4 gene 60, encoding topoisomerase,13,38 and in the trpR gene, encoding the E. coli trp repressor.3 Clearly, the sequences surrounding these sites must stimulate translational hopping in the same way that sequence contexts stimulate frameshifting. It is not immediately clear whether the distinction between translational frameshifts and translational hops has a functional significance, or if it is just a semantic, that is, whether hopping is mechanistically distinct from frameshifting, or if it is just frameshifting over longer distances. Yet there is almost certainly a mechanistic difference between frameshifting and hopping. It is easy to propose that programmed frameshift events are mechanistically very related to the nonprogrammed errors which occur during translation, as I have attempted to do.
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Farabaugh, P.J. (1997). tRNA Hopping. In: Programmed Alternative Reading of the Genetic Code. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-5999-3_7
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