Wallace C J
Department of Biochemistry, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada.
Protein Sci. 1993 May;2(5):697-705. doi: 10.1002/pro.5560020501.
The gradual accumulation of examples of protein splicing, in which a nested intervening sequence is spliced out of the interior of a polyprotein precursor, suggests that this curious phenomenon might prove to have universal phylogenetic distribution and biological significance. The known examples are reviewed, with the aim of establishing underlying patterns, and a generalized mechanism of autocatalytic protein splicing is proposed. The testable consequences of such a proposal and the possible evolutionary origins of the phenomenon are discussed.
蛋白质剪接实例逐渐积累,其中一段嵌套的插入序列从多蛋白前体内部被剪接出来,这表明这种奇特现象可能具有普遍的系统发育分布和生物学意义。本文回顾了已知实例,旨在确立潜在模式,并提出了一种自催化蛋白质剪接的通用机制。讨论了该提议可检验的结果以及该现象可能的进化起源。