Site talks about acceptor stem and if I understand it correctly seems to suggest that my idea of aa
originally connected to bases on the tRNA a possibility.
* Beckman Research Institute of the City of Hope, 1450 East Duarte Road, Duarte, CA 91010;
Institute of Cytology and Genetics, Siberian Branch of Russian Academy of Sciences, av. acad.
Lavrentieva 10, Novosibirsk 630090, Russia; and § Human Genetics Center, University of Texas, SPH,
P.O. Box 20334, Houston, TX 77225 Contributed by Susumu Ohno, December 28, 1995
A total of 1268 available (excluding mitochondrial) tRNA sequences was used to reconstruct the
common consensus image of their acceptor domains. Its structure appeared as a 11-bp-long double-
stranded palindrome with complementary triplets in the center, each flanked by the 3'-ACCD and NGGU-
5' motifs on each strand (D, base determinator). The palindrome readily extends up to the modern tRNA-
like cloverleaf passing through an intermediate hairpin having in the center the single-stranded
triplet, in supplement to its double-stranded precursor. The latter might represent an original anticodon-
codon pair mapped at 1-2-3 positions of the present-day tRNA acceptors. This conclusion is supported
by the striking correlation: in pairs of consensus tRNAs with complementary anticodons, their bases
at the 2nd position of the acceptor stem were also complementary. Accordingly, inverse
complementarity was also evident at the 71st position of the acceptor stem. With a single exception
(tRNAPhe-tRNAGlu pair), the parallelism is especially impressive for the pairs of tRNAs recognized
by aminoacyl-tRNA synthetases (aaRS) from the opposite classes....