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Science 5 October 2001:
Vol. 294. no. 5540, pp. 70 - 71
DOI: 10.1126/science.1066106
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Perspectives

Also see the archival list of Science's Compass: Enhanced Perspectives

PROTEIN SYNTHESIS:
Enhanced: Discriminating Right from Wrong

Michael Ibba

The cell has devised numerous quality controls to ensure the fidelity of protein synthesis. In his Perspective, Ibba describes a new form of quality control in the unlikely guise of elongation factor Tu (EF-Tu), the protein that delivers amino-acyl tRNAs to the ribosome. EF-Tu binds to all amino-acyl tRNAs over a wide range of affinities, whether the tRNAs are carrying the correct amino acid or not. But EF-Tu is able to discriminate between correctly charged and mischarged amino-acyl tRNAs through thermodynamic compensation (i.e., by detecting whether the separate amino acid and tRNA moieties of each amino-acyl tRNA have a strong and weak binding component that compensate for each other).

The author is at the Department of Microbiology, Ohio State University, Columbus, OH 43210, USA. E-mail: ibba.1{at}osu.edu

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THIS ARTICLE HAS BEEN CITED BY OTHER ARTICLES:
Structural elements defining elongation factor Tu mediated suppression of codon ambiguity.
H. Roy, H. D. Becker, M.-H. Mazauric, and D. Kern (2007)
Nucleic Acids Res. 35, 3420-3430
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