Title

Authors

Affiliation

¹Department of Computer Science, Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, IL 62901, USA; ²Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, IL 62901, USA

Email

zdu@chem.siu.edu; *Corresponding author

Article Type

Hypothesis

Date

Received March 14, 2013; Accepted March 24, 2013; Published August 07, 2013

We have used bioinformatics approaches to identify a potential case of -1 ribosomal frame shifting in the mRNAs of the three variants of human SEMA6C protein. The mRNAs contain a heptanucleotide slippery sequence followed by a compact H-type pseudoknot. Unlike -1 frameshifting signals in viral or viral-like mRNAs, the slippery sequence and downstream pseudoknot in SEMA6C mRNAs locate 423 nucleotides (encoding 141 amino acids) upstream of the stop codon. The potential -1 frameshifting event would produce a polypeptide of 238 residues encoded by the -1 reading frames. Sequence similarity searches using BLAST indicate that ~90% of the 238 residues match actual protein sequences annotated as SEMA6C proteins in the database. We propose that the mRNAs of human SEMA6C utilize a pseudoknot dependent -1 ribosomal frameshifting mechanism to express novel SEMA6C isoforms.

Keywords

RNA, pseudoknot, -1 ribosomal frame shifting, SEMA6C.

Citation

Huang et al.  Bioinformation 9(14): 736-738 (2013)

Edited by

P Kangueane

ISSN

0973-2063

Publisher

Biomedical Informatics

License

This is an Open Access article which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited. This is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License.