a Clustered heat map of median percent wild-type frameshifting of variants, in which the indicated region (upstream, slippery site (including the preceding codon) and downstream) differs from the native one (n = 37–325). b The median percent wild-type PRF signal of variants, in which the indicated position is changed is plotted for the entire length of the variable region; gray box: slippery site. c Percent wild-type −1 PRF signal for variants with a point mutation only in the indicated position of the slippery site; the box shows the quartiles of the dataset, while the whiskers show the rest of the distribution except for outliers (n = 22, 11, 7, 6, 7, 8, 10, and 17 sequences tested, in the order they appear on the graph). d Heat map showing median percent GFP fluorescence conferred by replacing the native slippery site in −1 PRF sites tested positive in the assay (Fig. 1c), with the indicated combination of slippery site elements. e Distribution of percent wild-type GFP fluorescence of variants, in which the slippery site was replaced by any possible combination of bases following the pattern XXXYYYZ; the box shows the quartiles of the dataset, while the whiskers show the rest of the distribution except for outliers (n = 80, 49, 57, 48, 42, 19, and 56 sequences tested, in the order they appear on the graph). f Distribution of normalized reads across GFP (+1 frame) expression bins for variants of the OAZ1 frameshifting site, in which either the first (left) or the second (right) codon is replaced; blue lines: wild type; green and magenta lines: bin profile for the variant, in which the native codon was replaced by the indicated one; gray lines: bin profiles for other codons at this position. g Percent GFP fluorescence for variants, in which the slippery site was replaced with all possible combinations of the slippery site pattern found in west nile virus (XYYZZZZ); the box shows the quartiles of the dataset, while the whiskers show the rest of the distribution except for outliers (n = 54, 56, 51, 24, 16, and 22 sequences tested, in the order they appear on the graph).