Abstract
Braking bad: stopping translation in hard times.
Highlights
A typical bacterial cell may contain tens of thousands of ribosomes, each one a tiny but intricate clamshell structure of two subunits, one large and one small
Between the two halves of the clamshell is the heart of the machine, where the tRNA adaptors—anticodon at one end and amino acid tagged onto the other—dock into the ribosome, find their match on the mRNA, and impart their amino acid cargo to the growing chain
This belt-tightening decision is known as the ‘‘stringent response’’, and is signalled by the so-called ‘‘alarmones’’, guanosine tetraphosphate and pentaphosphate, collectively named as (p)ppGpp, chemicals made by bacteria in response to low cellular levels of amino acids
Summary
A typical bacterial cell may contain tens of thousands of ribosomes, each one a tiny but intricate clamshell structure of two subunits, one large and one small. They spool along mRNAs, translating each codon into an amino acid that’s incorporated into a growing polypeptide to make the thousands of different proteins needed for cellular life.
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