Tunable translational control using site-specific unnatural amino acid incorporation in Escherichia coli

Translation of target gene transcripts in Escherichia coli harboring UAG amber stop codons can be switched on by the amber-codon-specific incorporation of an exogenously supplied unnatural amino acid, 3-iodo-L-tyrosine. Here, we report that this translational switch can control the translational efficiency at any intermediate magnitude by adjustment of the 3-iodo-L-tyrosine concentration in the medium, as a tunable translational controller. The translational efficiency of a target gene reached maximum levels with 10−5 M 3-iodo-L-tyrosine, and intermediate levels were observed with suboptimal concentrations (approximately spanning a 2-log10 concentration range, 10−7–10−5 M). Such intermediate-level expression was also confirmed in individual bacteria.

• Publication year

  2015

• Venue

  PeerJ

• Publication date

  2015-04-28

• Fields of study

  Biology, Medicine, Chemistry

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.7717/peerj.904PMID 25945307PMCID 4419535
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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