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Jan 11, Related Stories. Chemists solve biological challenge Jan 21, Care Connection Ingalls. For help with Ingalls Care Connection, call us at or email portalsupport ingalls. When cells are confronted with an invading virus or bacteria or exposed to an irritating chemical, they protect themselves by going off their DNA recipe and inserting the wrong amino acid into new proteins to defend them against damage, scientists have discovered.
These "regulated errors" comprise a novel non-genetic mechanism by which cells can rapidly make important proteins more resistant to attack when stressed, said Tao Pan, Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the University of Chicago.
Proteins are constructed through a process called translation where cellular elements use the genetic code to guide the assembly of building blocks called amino acids into the correct sequence. Transfer RNAs tRNA , one for each of the 20 amino acids used in building proteins, read the messenger RNA code and bring the proper amino acids to the ribosome, where they are bonded together to form a complete protein. Each tRNA can be attached to only one of 20 amino acids, a specificity that prevents errors during the construction of proteins.
In artificial laboratory preparations, scientists have observed that only one out of every 10, amino acids is placed into a protein incorrectly, and thus protein errors were thought to be exceptionally rare. After developing a novel technique for measuring these errors, published for the first time in this paper, the authors were surprised to find a much higher error rate in those cells for the amino acid methionine.
As high as one out of every methionines was incorrectly placed in proteins, they found. When the cells were stressed by exposure to a virus, bacteria or a toxic chemical such as hydrogen peroxide, that error rate went even higher, as up to 10 percent of methionines placed into new proteins were different from what the gene specified.
Further experiments revealed that it was always the same amino acid, methionine, placed incorrectly by the cell into new proteins. Methionine is one of only two amino acids to carry sulfur atoms on its side chains, a feature that allows it to neutralize dangerous molecules called reactive oxygen species ROS that form inside an infected or stressed cell. ROS can damage proteins through a chemical process called oxidation, but methionine can be oxidized and restored through a process called reduction without being permanently damaged.
It's a very interesting mechanism. Cells normally put methionines near important parts of a protein to protect those segments from being damaged by reactive oxygen species. When the cell is under stress, and the amount of ROS increases, the number of methionine "errors" is ramped up tenfold, allowing new proteins to be even more resistant to attack. You've put something right in front of it so a protein can take a hit.
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