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. 2018 May 15;1(2):111–115.

Figure 2.

Figure 2

Demonstration that short leader sequences encourage leaky scanning in the wheat germ translation system. [:«S]methionine-labeled proteins were fractionated by polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis as described previously (Kozak, 1989). The yield of CAT protein (lower band in the autoradiogram) is a measure of the extent to which ribosomes bypass the first AUG codon and initiate instead at the second AUG. With T7-derived mRNAs from plasmids T3(8334), T6(8334), T9(8334), and T12(8334), initiation from the second AUG codon declined as the 5′ non-coding sequence was lengthened from 3 to 12 nucleotides (lanes 1–4). In lanes 6–9, the presence of the structure-prone oligonucleotide 8336 downstream from the preCAT start site suppressed the tendency of ribosomes to bypass the first AUG codon.