Specific Interactions of Ribosomes in Decoding

Abstract

Five years ago, Marshall Nirenberg and I had the delightful experience of detecting the first coding unit when we found that polyuridylic acid coded only for the amino acid phenylalanine. We shall never forget the decisive help with polynucleotides given to us by Dr. Leon A. Heppel, and later on, by Dr. Maxine F. Singer. During the first two years after this finding, cell-free polypeptide synthesis directed with random polynucleotides revealed the net compositions of 49 coding units summarized at the 1963 Cold Spring Harbor Symposium (see also Matthaei, 1963). Forty-two of these are confirmed today. Searching for ways to determine coding nucleotide sequences, we reported at Berlin in May of 1964 an mRNA-dependent amino acid adapter-binding system called the "adapting system" (Matthaei et al., 1964). This system was, however, much more stimulated by polyuridylic acid than by equal amounts of the trinucleotide pUpUpU isolated from a pork liver nuclear...