Pulling out some of the “STOPs” for non-natural amino acid mutagenesis
Siddhartha Barua
Researchers from IISER Bhopal have demonstrated, in a study published in 2022, that the efficiency of stop codon readthrough translation can be markedly improved by strengthening the binding between the UAG stop codon and its suppressor tRNA. Incorporation of non-natural amino acids into proteins using this approach can be applied to several applications, such as visual tracking of fluorescent amino acid-bearing proteins in studies of protein localisation in cells and the introduction of photocrosslinker molecules into proteins to identify protein-protein interactions.
