Searching the Saccharomyces cerevisiae genome for-1 frameshifting sites

Introduction In 1985, Jacks and Varmus described the first-1 ribosomal frameshifting, from which they established the canonical model of eukaryotic-1 frameshifting site (Jacks et al., 1985 and 1988). Today, several tens of viruses and one mouse nuclear gene (Shigemoto et al., 2001) have been identified as bearing such a-1 frameshifting site. A typical site contains a "slippery" heptamer in 5', where both A and P site tRNAs slip by one nucleotide upstream, followed by a stimulatory structure (stem loop, or pseudoknot) downstream (Brierley et al., 1989). The "slippery" heptamer is separated from the stimulatory structure by a short sequence (3 to 11 nucleotides), the so-called "spacer". Based on this model, several studies have been undertaken to identify frameshifting sites in the nuclear genome of the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae (Hammell et al., 1999 and Liphardt, 1999). However, none of these allowed to identify with certainty authentic expressed genes controlled by-1 framesh