Adenine in the First Anticodon Position: Too Wobbly for Most

Hendriks, Siebrant (2024) Adenine in the First Anticodon Position: Too Wobbly for Most. Bachelor's Thesis, Biology.

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Abstract

Certain elements in the process of translation remain undiscovered, or uncommon knowledge, even to researchers within the field of biology itself. One example of this is the fact that we require fewer unique tRNAs/anticodons than the amount of unique codons present on the mRNA. How a reduced set of anticodons would pair with all the codons is described in the wobble hypothesis. One observation within this hypothesis is that the nucleotide base adenine does not seem to occur in the first anticodon position, also known as the 34th tRNA residue, or the wobble position. In this article we investigated models and experiments that aim to give a rationale as to why this is the case. The predominant conclusion seems to be that adenine in the first anticodon position would appear to alter the structure of tRNA in such a manner that most of its interactions in the translation process would be hindered in one way or another. However, there seems to be little experimental confirmation to this rationale. Perhaps partly because of this, throughout the years we observe more and more exceptions to this initial exclusion of adenine in the wobble position. In recent discoveries we found exceptions with archaea that have adenine present in the wobble position in certain tRNAs. Despite these findings there does appear to be an evolutionary disadvantage to having adenine in the wobble position that is worthwhile investigating.

Item Type:	Thesis (Bachelor's Thesis)
Supervisor name:	Egas, C.J.M.
Degree programme:	Biology
Thesis type:	Bachelor's Thesis
Language:	English
Date Deposited:	16 Jul 2024 12:38
Last Modified:	16 Jul 2024 12:38
URI:	https://fse.studenttheses.ub.rug.nl/id/eprint/33280

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