Abstract
To find a length of slippage-prone sequences at which selection against transcriptional slippage is evident, the transcription of repetitive runs of A and T of different lengths in 108 bacterial genomes was analyzed. IS element genes were found to exploit transcriptional slippage for regulation of gene expression.
Highlights
Transcription slippage occurs on certain patterns of repeat mononucleotides, resulting in synthesis of a heterogeneous population of mRNAs
Transcription of dnaX results in synthesis of a population of mRNAs in which the sequence 3' of the slippery AAAAAAAAA is framed in different molecules in all three reading frames relative to sequence 5' of the slippery motif
Where Pc is the number of pattern copies in coding regions, Pg is the number of copies in the whole genome, Nc the number of nucleotides in coding regions and Ng the size of the whole genome
Summary
Transcription slippage occurs on certain patterns of repeat mononucleotides, resulting in synthesis of a heterogeneous population of mRNAs. When transcriptional slippage occurs in a coding sequence, translation of the resulting mRNAs yields more than one protein product. Except where the products of the resulting mRNAs have distinct functions, transcription slippage occurring in a coding region is expected to be disadvantageous. When a transcription slippage-prone ('slippery') sequence occurs in a coding sequence, the mRNA products are heterogeneous In such an mRNA population, the sequence downstream of a slippery pattern generally occurs in all three different reading phases relative to the reading frame 5' of the slippage-prone sequence. Aberrant forms of beta-amyloid precursor protein and ubiquitin B found in Alzheimer's and Down syndrome patients are associated with molecular misreading, whose mechanism is likely to be transcriptional slippage [5]. Transcriptional slippage in the human APC gene (in addition to replicational slippage [9]) has been proposed as a cause of colorectal cancer [10]
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