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Updated: Jun 12, 2026

MS2-Affinity Purification Coupled with RNA Sequencing in Gram-Positive Bacteria
Published on: February 23, 2021
A transfer RNA inosine modification drives genome-wide synonymous recoding across human commensal bacterial families
Christopher D Katanski1,2, Chathuri Pathirage3, Jennifer C Chang4
1Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL 60637, USA.
None:
Inosine modification on transfer RNA (tRNA) anticodon (I34) is universally conserved in three kingdoms of life and critical to tRNA decoding capabilities. We found that tRNALeu(IAG) in commensal human bacterial families in Lactobaccilalles is concurrent with genome-wide synonymous leucine codon reprogramming. Pathway analysis reveals significant synonymous Leu codon changes in proteins in multiple KEGG pathways on cellular metabolism, where many genome-wide dominant UUA in families without tRNALeu(IAG) is reprogrammed to CUU, CUC, and UUG in families with tRNALeu(IAG). We provide biochemical and phenotypic results to support mechanisms that enable synonymous Leu codon substitutions to confer greater translation equivalency and growth fitness, indicating that a tRNA inosine modification can propel the genome-wide evolution of synonymous leucine codons.
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