A Demonstration of Coding Degeneracy for Leucine in the Synthesis of Protein

Creators: Weisblum, Bernard; Gonano, Fabio; von Ehrenstein, Gunter; Benzer, Seymour

Abstract

sRNA acts as an adaptor in the transfer of amino acids into protein [1-5]. Since an organism may contain more than one variety of sRNA for a given amino acid, different coding specificities of the various adaptors would provide a mechanism for degeneracy in the code. In E. coli sRNA, several leucine-acceptors have been shown to respond differently to various synthetic polynucleotides [5,6]. The experiments reported here were undertaken to determine whether the separate leucyl sRNA's actually contribute leucine to different sites in natural polypeptide chains. Evidence that they do is presented in this paper.

Additional Information

© 1965 by the National Academy of Sciences Communicated December 23, 1964 We wish to thank Dr. R. W. Holley for generously supplying the separated leucine acceptors used in preliminary experiments. We are also grateful to Dr. M. A. Naughton and Mr. G. Hicks for assisting us in the determination of the compositions of the peptides. This work was supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health. USPHS, the National Science Foundation, and by the AFOSR under contract AF49(638)-1304. One of us (Bernard Weisblum) was supported by USPHS fellowship 1-F3-CA-14,411-01 from the National Cancer Institute; Fabio Gonano was a fellow of the International Laboratory of Genetics and Biophysics, Naples, Italy.

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