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Bacterial physiology

New shears for SsrA

Nature Reviews Microbiology volume 6, page 874 (2008)Cite this article

“... SsrA ... adds a small tag to incompletely synthesized proteins and targets them for degradation.”

Stalled ribosomes are a problem for a cell: they deplete the pool of available ribosomes and lead to the formation of truncated proteins. Such ribosomes are rescued by SsrA (also called tmRNA), an RNA with properties of both tRNA and mRNA, which adds a small tag to incompletely synthesized proteins and targets them for degradation. Gur and Sauer report in a recent issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA on an evolutionary twist in the evolution of SsrA.

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ORIGINAL RESEARCH PAPER

  1. Gur, E. & Sauer, R. T. Evolution of the ssrA degradation tag in Mycoplasma: specificity switch to a different protease. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 42, 16113–16118 (2008)

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  1. Christiaan van Ooij
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van Ooij, C. New shears for SsrA. Nat Rev Microbiol 6, 874 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1038/nrmicro2036

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