This week's evolgen Double Entendre Friday is brief. It's also not my own idea, and I can't seem to remember where I stole it from (if I stole it from you, drop a note in the comments). Sorry. Here it is:
Two glutamines bump into each other waiting to aminoacylate a tRNA. One says to the other, "I saw you hanging out near that ribosome with your last tRNA. Did you go all the way?" The other replies, "Well, my tRNA got me into the A site, but we were caught pretending to be a histidine. After that, there was no way the ribosome was going to let me get through her exit tunnel."
Incidentally, one way to study translation is to probe the ribosomal exit tunnel.
More like this
In light of the recent post on translational selection, I give you this paper from PLoS Genetics on tissue specific differences in tRNA expression
As we all know, the genetic code is redundant. Within protein coding regions, substitutions at silent sites do not affect the amino acid sequence of the encoded protein.
Pim van Meurs has a blog post at The Panda's Thumb about the recent paper on translational selection on a synonymous polymorphic site in a
I remember watching this movie (WARNING: link to a large file) during my sophomore year of college. It now appears that some folks at Kenyon College plan to do a remake.