Identification of unusual RNA folding patterns encoded by bacteriophage T4 gene 60.

A 50-nucleotide (nt) untranslated region (coding gap sequence) that interrupts the amino acid coding sequence in T4 gene 60, plus an additional 5 nt upstream and another 3 nt downstream from the gap sequence, shows unusual folding patterns according to RNA structure prediction. A predicted highly stable and significant hairpin structure in the 5' half of the gap sequence and a plausible tertiary structural element computed in the 3' part of the gap sequence seem significant by statistical tests on the wild-type (wt) sequence. This feature is absent in insertion, deletion and substitution variants of the gap sequence, in which template activities are markedly lower than that of the wt. The proposed feature is consistent with currently available data showing that the translational bypass of the coding gap is correlated with a stop codon involved in a stem-loop structure folded in the gap sequence. We suggest that the role of this segment in 'ribosomal bypass' of a portion of the mRNA sequence is a property of its special folded structure.