Following an interesting branch
Understanding the basis for this rapid inhibition of cell growth made an ideal research project for summer interns working in Freimuth's lab. This nonsense strand had been churned out by mistake when the bacteria's ribosomes translated the letters that make up the"out of phase." Instead of reading the code in chunks of three letters that code for a particular amino acid, the ribosome read only the second two letters of one chunk plus the first letter of the next triplet. That resulted in putting the wrong amino acids in place.
"If a bacterial cell has 50,000 ribosomes, each one churning out a different aberrant protein, does the toxic effect result from one specific aberrant protein or from a combination of many? This question emerged decades ago and had never been resolved," Freimuth said.. Freimuth and his team found that the aberrant plant protein indeed activated the initial step in protein quality control, but that later stages of the process directly required for degradation of aberrant proteins were blocked. They also discovered that the difference between cell life and death was dependent on the rate at which the aberrant protein was produced.
"The good news is that now we have a single protein, with a known amino acid sequence, that we can use as a model to explore that mechanism," Freimuth said.
PLOSONE this is great news, antibiotic resistant bacteria is becoming a greater problem