Gleaning unexpected fruits from hard-won synthetases: probing principles of permissivity in non-canonical amino acid-tRNA synthetases.

ABSTRACT: The site-specific incorporation of non-canonical amino acids (ncAAs) into proteins is an important tool for understanding biological function. Traditionally, each new ncAA targeted for incorporation requires a resource-consuming process of generating new ncAA aminoacyl tRNA synthetase/tRNACUA pairs. However, the discovery that some tRNA synthetases are "permissive", in that they can incorporate multiple ncAAs, means that it is no longer always necessary to develop a new synthetase for each newly desired ncAA. Developing a better understanding of what factors make ncAA synthetases more permissive would increase the utility of this new approach. Here, we characterized two synthetases selected for the same ncAA that have markedly different "permissivity profiles." Remarkably, the more permiss

SUBMITTER: Cooley RB 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4199100 | biostudies-literature | 2014 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature