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Updated: Jun 6, 2026

Isolation of Translating Ribosomes Containing Peptidyl-tRNAs for Functional and Structural Analyses
Published on: February 25, 2011
Let's see how tmRNA rescues a stuck ribosome
1Department of Structural Biology and Genomics, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Institute of Genetics and of Molecular and Cellular Biology, Université de Strasbourg, Illkirch, France. klaholz@igbmc.fr
Abstract:
In the current issue, Weis et al (2010a) and Fu et al (2010) provide cryo-electron microscopy snapshots of different states of the bacterial ribosome-rescuing complex with tmRNA. This regulatory RNA molecule remarkably carries both tRNA- and mRNA-like elements that have to move through the ribosome machinery when it is stalled on an mRNA lacking a termination codon. The comparison of three intermediate states gives novel insights into the mechanism of tmRNA translocation and transient accommodation on the ribosome, and into trans-translation—the template switching from a defective mRNA to the short coding region of the tmRNA, which allows rescuing the stuck ribosome.
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