Sorry my comment caused confusion. poorgradstudent is on target with his follow up comments and is biotechjim. As far as being thrown by my comment, I was thrown by this issue myself when I first heard about it in a paper presented by someone else in journal club a few years ago. Sorry jim but I don't have that reference at my fingertips but it should be possible to use google scholar to get at somethingn gon this topic
I was thinking of two different mechanisms. First, change to a rare codon can slow translation and lead to a lower steady state protein level. In this case, the intrinsic activity of the protein would be unaltered but the overall activity of that protein in the cell would be reduced. As poorgradstudent surmised, the second case was indeed co-translational modifications. If the rare codon slows translation enough, it can alter protein folding and or alter post-tranlational modifications (notably at the ER), both of which can impact intrinsic and overall protein activity.
Google co-translational modification or better yet co-translational modification rare codon mutation effects and see what pops up. I did and got the following review that might interest people. It raises another issue I hadn't thought about, which is the effect on mRNA folding and stability.
Molecular Systems Biology 7 Article number: 481 doi:10.1038/msb.2011.14
Published online: 12 April 2011
Citation: Molecular Systems Biology 7:481
Determinants of translation efficiency and accuracy
Hila Gingold1 & Yitzhak Pilpel1
Department of Molecular Genetics Weizmann Institute of science, Rehovot, Israel
AI
