The Pyrrolysine reference article from the English Wikipedia on 24-Jul-2004 (provided by Fixed Reference: snapshots of Wikipedia from wikipedia.org)

Pyrrolysine

Pyrrolysine is an amino acid used by some bacteria and archaea in enzymes that are part of their methane-producing metabolisms. It is coded for by a UAG codon, which is normally a stop codon named "amber" but whose meaning is modified by the presence of a specific downstream sequence, named PYLIS, which forms a stem-loop in the mRNA, forcing the incorporation of pyrrolysine instead of terminating transcription.

See also selenocysteine, an amino acid with a similar mechanism of encoding in other organisms.

This is the "Pyrrolysine" reference article from the English Wikipedia. All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License. See also our Disclaimer.