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. 1986 Sep 11;14(17):7001–7016. doi: 10.1093/nar/14.17.7001

Expression strategies of the yeast retrotransposon Ty: a short sequence directs ribosomal frameshifting.

W Wilson, M H Malim, J Mellor, A J Kingsman, S M Kingsman
PMCID: PMC311713  PMID: 3020502

Abstract

The Ty element of yeast is a member of a class of eukaryotic transposons which bear a striking resemblance to retroviral proviruses in their structure and expression strategies (1,2). A direct comparison can be drawn between the production of a fusion protein encoded by Ty, resulting from a frameshift event which fuses two out-of-phase open reading frames TYA and TYB, and the production of Pr180gag-pol in a retrovirus such as Rous Sarcoma Virus (RSV) (3,4). We present data which shows, definitively, that RNA splicing is not responsible for the frameshift in Ty. By in vitro mutation of a class I element, Ty1-15, we demonstrate that 31 nucleotides contained within the region where the TYA and TYB open reading frames overlap direct the frameshift. Within this short sequence there is a region of homology with a class II element which we show is also able to frameshift.

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Selected References

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