A closer look at the absolute b-galactosidase and firefly luciferase activities revealed that firefly luciferase expression from pAC-Cm was clearly reduced (data not shown). In fact, expression from the inframe control was comparable to the corresponding pAC-C test construct. This was also obvious when the firefly luciferase activities were normalized with the total protein amount. After setting the activity from pAC-Am to a relative value of one, the corresponding values from pAC-Bm and pAC-Cm were 0.80 and 0.28. Although the b-galactosidase measurements (Table 1) suggested that the overall translatability of the pAC-Cm mRNA was also reduced to some extent, it explained the decrease in firefly luciferase expression only partially. In the light of these findings, the extremely high À1 PRF frequency estimate calculated for the C-region could be explained with more frequent translation termination at the frameshift signals of the pAC-Cm mRNA, which reduced firefly luciferase activity in relation to b-galactosidase.