Polyadenylation in E. coli: a 20 year odyssey
- Department of Genetics, University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia 30602, USA
- Corresponding author: skushner{at}uga.edu
This extract was created in the absence of an abstract.
Although poly(A) polymerase was first discovered in Escherichia coli, polyadenylation was deemed only to occur in eukaryotes well into the 1990s. For example, in Benjamin Lewin's sixth addition of Genes published in 1997, polyadenylation is defined as “…the addition of a sequence of polyadenylic acid to the 3′ end of a eukaryotic RNA after its transcription.” This common misconception arose in spite of considerable work throughout the 1980s on the existence of poly(A) tails in E. coli by the group of Nilima Sarkar. It was not until the identification of pcnB as the structural gene for E. coli poly(A) polymerase (PAP I) that it became possible to begin a careful analysis of polyadenylation in a prokaryote.
My laboratory became interested in polyadenylation in the early 1990s when we noticed that several mRNAs actually appeared to increase in size long after new transcription had been stopped by the addition of …
