Translational errors: from yeast to new therapeutic targets

Errors occur randomly and at low frequency during the translation of mRNA. However, such errors may also be programmed by the sequence and structure of the mRNA. These programmed events are called 'recoding' and are found mostly in viruses, in which they are usually essential for viral replication. Translational errors at a stop codon may also be induced by drugs, raising the possibility of developing new treatment protocols for genetic diseases on the basis of nonsense mutations. Many studies have been carried out, but the molecular mechanisms governing these events remain largely unknown. Studies on the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae have contributed to characterization of the HIV-1 frameshifting site and have demonstrated that frameshifting is conserved from yeast to humans. Yeast has also proved a particularly useful model organism for deciphering the mechanisms of translation termination in eukaryotes and identifying the factors required to obtain a high level of natural suppression. These findings open up new possibilities for large-scale screening in yeast to identify new drugs for blocking HIV replication by inhibiting frameshifting or restoring production of the full-length protein from a gene inactivated by a premature termination codon. We explore these two aspects of the contribution of yeast studies to human medicine in this review.