© KIMBERLY BATTISTA
Certain ciliates use traditional stop codons ambiguously during translation. Sometimes these three-base-long RNA sequences code for an amino acid (green, left), and sometimes induce translation termination (red, right). Researchers propose that at the end of the mRNA coding sequence, the ribosome bumps up against proteins involved in termination—namely, eukaryotic release factors (eRF1 and eRF3) and poly(A) binding proteins (PABP)—thereby indicating that a stop codon means stop.
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