Occurrence of downstream additional stop codons. The occurrence of additional stop codons within 15 nucleotides downstream from the primary stop codons TAA, TAG, and TGA is shown. All ORFs in E. coli (A), B. subtilis (B), and M. smegmatis (C) were analyzed. The horizontal bars represent percentages of the total genes with additional stop codons TAG (black), TGA (red), and TAA (green). Freq., frequency.