Cysteinyl-tRNA formation: The last puzzle of aminoacyl-tRNA synthesis

Tong Li, David E. Graham, Constantinos Stathopoulos, Paul J. Haney, Hyun Soo Kim, Ute Vothknecht, Makoto Kitabatake, Kwang Won Hong, Gudmundur Eggertsson, Alan W. Curnow, Winston Lin, Ivana Celic, William Whitman, Dieter Söll

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

30 Scopus citations

Abstract

With the exception of the methanogenic archaea Methanococcus jannaschii and Methanobacterium thermoautotrophicum ΔH, all organisms surveyed contain orthologs of Escherichia coli cysteinyl-tRNA synthetase (CysRS). The characterization of CysRS-encoding (cysS) genes and the demonstration of their ability to complement an E. coli cysS(ts) mutant reveal that Methanococcus maripaludis and Methanosarcina barkeri, two other methanogenic archaea, possess canonical CysRS proteins. A molecular phylogeny inferred from 40 CysRS sequences indicates that the CysRS of M. maripaludis and Methanosarcina spp. are specific relatives of the CysRS of Pyrococcus spp. and Chlamydia, respectively. This result suggests that the CysRS gene was acquired by lateral gene transfer in at least one euryarchaeotic lineage. Copyright (C) 1999 Federation of European Biochemical Societies.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)302-306
Number of pages5
JournalFEBS Letters
Volume462
Issue number3
DOIs
StatePublished - Dec 3 1999
Externally publishedYes

Funding

We thank S. Fitz-Gibbon, T. Hartsch, D. Oesterhelt, A. Ruepp and S. Schuster for sharing unpublished sequence data. M.K. was a postdoctoral fellow of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science. D.E.G. was supported by an NIH Cellular and Molecular Biology Training grant. This work was supported by grants from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (to D.S.) and the U.S. Department of Energy (to D.S. and W.B.W.).

Keywords

  • Aminoacyl-tRNA
  • Cysteinyl-tRNA synthetase

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