A DEMONSTRATION OF CODING DEGENERACY FOR LEUCINE IN THE SYNTHESIS OF PROTEIN

Abstract

sRNA acts as an adaptor in the transfer of amino acids into protein [1-5]. Since an organism may contain more than one variety of sRNA for a given amino acid, different coding specificities of the various adaptors would provide a mechanism for degeneracy in the code. In E. coli sRNA, several leucine-acceptors have been shown to respond differently to various synthetic polynucleotides [5,6]. The experiments reported here were undertaken to determine whether the separate leucyl sRNA's actually contribute leucine to different sites in natural polypeptide chains. Evidence that they do is presented in this paper.