A mutation at the universally conserved position 529 in Escherichia coli 16S rRNA creates a functional but highly error prone ribosome.

A base substitution of G to U was constructed at position 529 in Escherichia coli 16S rRNA. The U529 mutant ribosomes were functional and present on polysomes but were highly error prone and caused a progressive loss of cell viability. They displayed elevated levels of readthrough of stop codons and frameshifting, and an increase in thermal sensitivity of beta-galactosidase, suggestive of missense errors. These results demonstrate that the university conserved G529 is involved in tRNA selection at the A site during protein synthesis.