BACKGROUND Mutations in MECP2 are the main cause of Rett Syndrome. To date, no pathogenic synonymous MECP2 mutation has yet been identified. Here, we investigated a de novo synonymous variant c.48C>T (p.Gly16Gly) identified in a girl presenting with a typical RTT phenotype. METHODS In silico analyses to predict the effects of sequence variation on mRNA splicing were employed, followed by sequ...

Expression of viral proteins frequently includes non-canonical decoding events ('recoding') during translation. '2A' oligopeptides drive one such event, termed 'stop-carry on' recoding. Nascent 2A peptides interact with the ribosomal exit tunnel to dictate an unusual stop codon-independent termination of translation at the final Pro codon of 2A. Subsequently, translation 'reinitiates' on the sa...

The bacterial ribosome switches from an mRNA lacking an in-frame stop codon and resumes translation on a specialized RNA known as tmRNA, SsrA or 10Sa RNA. We find that the ribosome can reach and use the extreme 3' terminal codon of the defective mRNA prior to switching. The first triplet to be translated in tmRNA (the resume codon) is determined at two levels: distant elements in tmRNA restrict...

Heterogeneous DNA sequences can be partitioned into homogeneous domains that are comprised of the four nucleotides A, C, G, and T and the stop codons. Recursively, we apply a new entropic segmentation method on DNA sequences using Jensen-Shannon and Jensen-Rényi divergences in order to find the borders between coding and noncoding DNA regions. We have chosen 12and 18-symbol alphabets that captu...