Ribosomal modification and resistance in antibiotic-producing organisms.

Antibiotic producing organisms defend themselves against their products in a variety of ways including modification of the normal target sites for antibiotic action. In the ribosomal context, some organisms that produce inhibitors of protein synthesis render their own ribosomes refractory to the autogenous drugs via specific methylation of ribosomal RNA. Such hints that antibiotics might normally recognize RNA within the ribosome, complement other data in suggesting that RNA might be intimately associated with--and, in evolutionary terms, might originally have constituted--various functional sites within the ribosome.