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The effect of the plating medium on the recovery of nonsense suppressors in Saccharomyces cerevisiae

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Abstract

The recovery of nonsense suppressors in a strain of Saccharomyces cerevisiae carrying five ochre mutations, tr, hi, ly, ar, and ad, is affected by the plating medium. The highest frequency is observed on tryptophanless medium, while the lowest is observed on adenineless medium. Experiments showed that exogenous histidine inhibits suppressor expression and that exogenous adenine relieves this inhibition. In histidine-independent strains, mutation expression requires adenine. A model, based on the role of RNA in supersuppression and on the biosynthetic pathways of histidine and adenine, is proposed to account for the observed data. It cannot, however, account for the high frequency of suppressors on tryptophanless medium. The tentative conclusion is drawn either that mis-reading of the tryptophan nonsense codon by mutated tRNA is facilitated by the neighboring bases or that the type of acceptable amino acid is less rigorously limited in the mutated site of the tryptophan locus than in those of the other suppressible loci.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Genetics, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, Scotland

    Clara Queiroz

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  1. Clara Queiroz
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This work was in part supported by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation and by the Medical Research Council (Grant No. G969/24/B).

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Queiroz, C. The effect of the plating medium on the recovery of nonsense suppressors in Saccharomyces cerevisiae . Biochem Genet 8, 85–100 (1973). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00485559

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00485559

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