An antisuppressor mutation of Schizosaccharomyces pombe affects the post-transcriptional modification of the "wobble" base in the anticodon of tRNAs.

The screening of antisuppressor mutants of the yeast Schizosaccharomyces pombe has been successfully accomplished with high resolution liquid chromatographic methods for the analysis of tRNA nucleosides. Antisuppressor mutations reduce or abolish the function of nonsense suppressor-tRNAs or other informational suppressors. Nonradioactive or 35S-labeled unfractionated tRNA from various strains was digested to nucleosides and analyzed by high performance liquid chromatography. The mutant sin3 has lost the nucleoside 5-(methoxycarbonylmethyl)-2-thiouridine from its tRNA in comparison to parental strains. In eukaryotes this nucleoside is found at the first position of the anticodon (wobble position) in several isoacceptor tRNAs that preferentially recognize codons ending with adenosine. The sin3 mutation reduces the efficiency of UGA and UAA suppressor tRNASer and suppressor tRNALeu. The genetic cosegregation of modification loss, antisuppressor phenotype, and a change in cell size is demonstrated. This indicates that a single mutation in the structural gene for a tRNA modification enzyme causes the three different phenotypes.