Binding of tobramycin to Escherichia coli ribosomes: characteristics and equilibrium of the reaction.

A sample of [3H] tobramycin (5,000 Ci/Mole) has been synthetized and incubated with the bacterial ribosome and its subunits. The results obtained show that this antibiotic has two types of binding sites. The primary one is probably responsible for the inhibition of protein synthesis whereas the secondary one is probably related to the misreading and reading through of the messenger RNA.