Mistranslation during phenylalanine starvation.

Starvation for phenylalanine led to leucine misincorporation frequencies of 0.1 and 0.6 at UUC codons in the argI transcript of Escherichia coli, but no detectable misincorporation at a UUU codon. Under similar starvation conditions the relative synthesis of full sized MS2 coat protein, encoded by the RNA virus or a DNA copy, is greatly reduced, preventing analysis of the protein. This reduction in amount is unaffected by a rpsL mutation.