Macrolides are widely used antibiotics that are thought to act by binding to and plugging up the ribosome, thereby halting protein translation. But "several reports in the past didn't fit too snugly in this model," says Alexander Mankin of the University of Illinois at Chicago. He and his colleagues retested the assumption by treating E. coli with high doses of the macrolide erythromycin and found that some proteins were still translated.
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