The possible role of sense and antisense peptide interactions in the generation and maintenance of the tertiary structure of a protein.

Antisense peptide is an amino acid sequence translated from antisense sequence of mRNA for a peptide sequence (sense peptide). Previous evidence indicates that sense and antisense peptides have a tendency to interact with each other. We expected that this kind of interaction might be involved in the formation and maintenance of tertiary structure of protein molecules. Many amino acids have several RNA codons and we regarded amino acids coded by anti-codons of all of codons of each amino acid as antisense amino acids. On this stand point, we generated a computer program to search for antisense peptides. Then we found that there are peptide sequences which are antisense to several peptide sequences in a protein molecule, and these peptide sequences have been termed as antisense homology boxes (AHB). AHB peptides were synthesized and some of them had a potent capacity to interfere with the function of the molecule.