Darshan Sapkota, a post-doc in our lab, was recently awarded a fellowship to pursue the functional role for stop codon readthrough. Many genes have multiple stop codons within their (potential) coding sequence; sometimes, ribosomes “read through” one of these stop codons and continue adding amino acids to the protein chain–and these proteins appear to mature and function. Darshan is looking to explore what causes this readthrough to occur, and what functional changes are induced in proteins that are encoded as a consequence of readthrough.
Congrats Darshan! Can’t wait to see what you turn up!