Molecular Biology Commons^™

Probing The Genetic Code With Leucine Trna Variants, Peter Anderson Hall

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Mistranslation is an error in protein synthesis whereby the amino acids specified by the genetic code are misplaced by others in the growing polypeptide chain. The anticodon of tRNA^Leu can be altered allowing for the misincorporation of leucine at non-leucine codons. Observing the effect of tRNA^Leu variants on the viability of yeast and mammalian cells will provide information on their ability to cause mistranslation and potential relationship to genetic diseases. To explore this, a random pool of tRNA^Leu anticodonvariants was expressed in Saccharomyces cerevisiae. Furthermore, three mutant tRNA^Leu already sequenced from humans were expressed in …