Novel enzymatic transformations in secondary metabolism and tRNA modification

Predicting Mitochondrial tRNA Modification

M itochondria are integral to proper cell function, and mutations in its small genome (mtDNA) are associated with many diseases, along with the progression of normal aging [9]. While mtDNA has been extensively studied, not much is known about transcriptional variations of mitochondrial genes [3]. Recently, tRNA modifications have been the focus of intense study owing to their putative role in d...

Posttranscriptional modification of tRNA in psychrophilic bacteria.

Posttranscriptional modification in tRNA is known to play a multiplicity of functional roles, including maintenance of tertiary structure and cellular adaptation to environmental factors such as temperature. Nucleoside modification has been studied in unfractionated tRNA from three psychrophilic bacteria (ANT-300 and Vibrio sp. strains 5710 and 29-6) and one psychrotrophic bacterium (Lactobacil...

Photolytic and enzymatic transformations of pteroylglutamic acid.

Bloom et al. (1) found that ultraviolet light converted pteroylglutamic acid (PGA) which is not fluorescent into a fluorescent material. Stokstad, Fordham, and de Grunigen (2) observed that sunlight caused the liberation of a diazotizable amine, indicating that cleavage had occurred between the pterine and the p-aminobenzoylglutamic acid components. As part of a search for a sensitive analytica...

Enzymatic hydrolysis of N-substituted aminoacyl-tRNA.

The mechanism of the release of polypeptide chains from the ribosome-messenger RNA complex is not fully understood. It has been reported that free polypeptide chains are formed in cell-free protein-synthesizing systems, directed by polyribonucleotides, only if these polynucleotides contain statistically high frequencies of UAA codons.'-5 However, we do not know how the chain is released from th...

Enzymatic modification of phospholipids Identification