Have you seen? Not an inside job: non-coded amino acids compromise the genetic code

The sophistication of the editing mechanisms that prevent gene translation errors indicates that amino acid misincorporation is generally a problem to be avoided. Mistranslation is considered invariably deleterious and often caused by confusion between similar proteogenic amino acids. These views are being challenged. The evidence linking misincorporation of dietary non-proteogenic amino acids to human disease continues to grow, and a report in this issue of The EMBO Journal demonstrates the importance of preventing non-proteogenic amino acid misincorporation for cellular homeostasis (Cvetesic et al, 2014).