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Updated: Mar 19, 2026

Single Molecule Fluorescence Energy Transfer Study of Ribosome Protein Synthesis
Published on: July 6, 2021
Comment on "Ribosome utilizes the minimum free energy changes to achieve the highest decoding rate and fidelity"
1Department of Physiology, Biophysics and Systems Biology, Faculty of Medicine, Technion, Haifa, 31096, Israel.
Abstract:
We examined [Y. Savir and T. Tlusty, Cell 153, 471 (2013)10.1016/j.cell.2013.03.032] the decoding performance of tRNA by the ribosome. For this purpose, we specified the kinetics of tRNA decoding and the corresponding energy landscape, from which we calculated the steady-state decoding rate R_{C}. Following our work, Xie reexamined [P. Xie, Phys. Rev. E 92, 022716 (2015)10.1103/PhysRevE.92.022716] the energy landscape of tRNA decoding. His analysis relies on an alternative expression for R_{C}, while claiming that the expression we use is missing some terms. In this Comment we rederive in detail our expression for the steady-state decoding rate R_{C}, show they hold, explain why the alternative expression for R_{C} is inaccurate, and discuss the underlying intuition.
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