Endogenous Stochastic Decoding of the CUG Codon by Competing Ser- and Leu-tRNAs in Ascoidea asiatica (Current Biology)

Mühlhausen et al. discover that Ascoidea asiatica stochastically encodes CUG as both serine and leucine, which is most likely caused by two competing tRNAs. This is the first example where the non-ambiguity rule of the genetic code is broken. To minimize its effect, A. asiatica uses CUG only rarely and never at conserved sequence positions.