Polymerase stuttering

A polymerase may undergo stuttering as a probability controlled event, hence it is not explicitly controlled by any mechanisms in the translation process. Generally, it is a result of many short repeated frameshifts on a slippery sequence of nucleotides on the mRNA strand.^[1] However, the frameshift is restricted to one (in some cases two^[2]) nucleotides with a pseudoknot or choke points on both sides of the sequence.

A polymerase that exhibits this behavior is RNA-dependent RNA polymerase, present in many RNA viruses. Reverse transcriptase has also been observed to undergo this polymerase stuttering.^[3]