The 40S ribosomal subunit cannot directly recognize the start codon of eukaryotic mRNAs. Instead, it recognizes the start codon after its association with the 5'-cap structure via translation initiation factors. Base-by-base inspection of the 5'UTR by a scanning ribosome is the generally accepted hypothesis of start codon selection. As part of an effort to confirm the underlying mechanism of st...

Incorrect protein translation, caused by codon mismatch, is an important problem of living cells. In this work, a computational model was introduced to quantify the effects of codon mismatch and the model was used to study the protein translation of Saccharomyces cerevisiae. According to simulation results, the probability of codon mismatch will increase when the supply of amino acids is unbala...

Standard vectors for high-level expression elicited undetectable levels of the gH and gL glycoproteins of rhesus monkey rhadinovirus (RRV) following transient-transfection assays under a variety of conditions. These same vectors and conditions yielded high levels of RRV gB expression. Unlike other genes of RRV, both the gH and gL genes were noted to have a highly aberrant, suboptimal codon usag...

the gene encoding the human basic fibroblast growth factor (hbfgf) has been already chemically-synthesized and cloned in pet-3a expression vector (pasteur institute of iran). in the present study, we compared the level of expression of this synthetic hbfgf and its related cdna in escherichia coli. the pbr322-cdna of hbfgf supplied by dr. seno (from molecular biology dept, okaido prefectural uni...

Exogenous transfer RNAs (tRNAs) favor translation of bovine papillomavirus 1 wild-type (wt) L1 mRNA in in vitro translation systems (Zhou et al. 1999, J. Virol., 73, 4972-4982). We, therefore, investigated whether papillomavirus (PV) wt L1 protein expression could be enhanced in eukaryotic cells following exogenous tRNA supplementation. Both Chinese hamster ovary (CHO) and Cos1 cells, transfect...

Leaderless translation is prevalent in haloarchaea, with many of these leaderless transcripts possessing short 5'-untranslated regions (UTRs) less than 10 nucleotides. Whereas, little is known about the function of this very short 5'-UTR. Our previous studies determined that just four nucleotides preceded the start codon of hsp70 mRNA in Natrinema sp. J7, with residues -3A and +4G, relative to ...