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Science 5 October 2001:
Vol. 294. no. 5540, p. 9
DOI: 10.1126/science.294.5540.9l
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This Week in Science
Triplet repeat expansions occur in several human genetic diseases and always result in a deleterious phenotype. Studying the bacterium Escherichia coli, Ritz et al. (p. 158) describe a triplet repeat expansion that is beneficial. An E. coli strain that grows poorly because of a defect in the reduction of protein disulfide bonds undergoes a phenotypic reversion at high frequency because of reversible expansion of a TCT repeat sequence in the ahpC gene. Remarkably, this genetic alteration restores normal cell growth because it introduces a single amino acid into the AhpC protein that converts it from a peroxidase to a disulfide reductase. The ready mutational interconversion of these two enzyme activities may allow the bacteria to survive conditions of oxidative or disulfide stress.
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Science. ISSN 0036-8075 (print), 1095-9203 (online)
