Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics Associate Professor Yi-Tao Yu, Ph.D. was a co-corresponding author on a paper recently published in Nature. This work presented a novel and completely unexpected codon-anticodon base-pairing interaction in the ribosomal decoding center during translation. This work provided a molecular basis for the decoding of a nonsense codon by the ribosome.
The research was carried out in collaboration with the Venki Ramakrishnan lab at MRC in Cambridge, UK. Dr. Ramakrishnan won the 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry (along with Thomas Steitz and Ada Yonath) for his pioneering work on the structure and function of ribosome. Dr. Ramakrishnan will be visiting U of R in October.