Antizyme is one example of certain mRNA-contained signals that can elevate speci®c frameshifting >1000-fold above the background level of normal translational errors. In addition to antizyme, frameshifting is also involved in the decoding of some bacterial and yeast genes and especially in many mammalian Retroviruses and Coronaviruses, plant viruses and bacterial insertion sequences (Atkins et al., 1999) . The site of frameshifting in both mammalian antizyme 1 and 2 mRNAs is UCC UGA, where quadruplet translocation occurs at UCCU (underlined) to shift reading to the +1 frame, immediately before the UGA stop codon of the initiating frame (Matsufuji et al., 1995; Ivanov et al., 1998a) . For the frameshifting to occur with an ef®ciency of 20% or more, it is important that the 3¢ base of the quadruplet is the ®rst base of a stop codon. Other important features are a pseudoknot just 3¢ of the shift site and a speci®c sequence 5¢ of the shift site (Matsufuji et al., 1995; Ivanov et al., 1998a) . A pseudoknot 3¢ of the shift site is a common stimulator for eukaryotic ±1 frameshifting, but the synthesis of antizyme is the only known case utilizing +1 frameshifting.