E85J000 <E85J at UNB.CA> writes:
>Has anyone out there seen any recent articles from Tyler Jacks since
>hisoriginal work with ribosomal frameshifting in RSV's gag-poL? I
>haven't been able to find anything since the Cell 55(447-458) paper
>in 1988 on the signals for frameshifting. I've been doing a lot of
>work recently on a term paper on the subject and haven't been able to
>find anything, though his work up to '88 seems top notch.
I'm sure Tyler would be tickled to get such a glowing endorsement!
Tyler was a fellow grad stud at UCSF in the mid-80's in biochem.
Truly a star, he did indeed nail the frameshifting problem -what was then
called the gag-pol problem pretty well-. Anyway, he graduated and is
now a postdoc at the whitehead. He doesn't work on frameshifting anymore
(has been hard at work on an RB-knockout mouse). We collaborated at the
time on a massive and essentially negative search of genbank for likely
shifty sequences. If you have any specific questions, you could try
phoning the Whitehead or I could forward them.
Historical tidbit: Tyler demonstrated framshifting first in RSV gagpol.
When I wrote a program to search Genbank for similar Motifs, it found
all the then-known shifters EXCEPT RSV itself! Curious, I checked the header
info (which the program used to create a virtual cDNA sequence) and found
that the authors (Gilbert and co.) had put in an intron ad hoc to
"explain" how gagpol got made. This misinformation so far as I know
still sits in GenBank along with god knows how many others weird errors
accumulated like cybernetic sediment in the database. Caveat Searchor...
I told tyler last year to get on the net but flattery was not one
of the expected benefits...;^).
hope this helps
robin colgrove
fellow in infectious diseases
harvard medical school
robin at calypso.bih.harvard.edu
