All Stories

  1. Mechanistic and evolutionary insights into a family of aminoacyl-tRNA deacylases that protects against canavanine toxicity

    Article • Nucleic Acids Research, September 2025, Oxford University Press (OUP)

    Oscar Vargas

  2. An engineered glutamic acid tRNA for efficient suppression of pathogenic nonsense mutations

    Article • Nucleic Acids Research, June 2025, Oxford University Press (OUP)

    Oscar Vargas

  3. Mechanistic and evolutionary insights into a family of aminoacyl-tRNA deacylases that protects against canavanine toxicity

    Article • May 2025, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press

    Oscar Vargas

  4. Efficient suppression of premature termination codons with alanine by engineered chimeric pyrrolysine tRNAs

    Article • Nucleic Acids Research, November 2024, Oxford University Press (OUP)

    Oscar Vargas

  5. Coexisting bacterial aminoacyl‐tRNAsynthetase paralogs exhibit distinct phylogenetic backgrounds and functional compatibility withEscherichia coli

    Article • IUBMB Life, October 2024, Wiley

    Oscar Vargas

  6. AARS Online: A collaborative database on the structure, function, and evolution of the aminoacyl‐tRNA synthetases

    Article • IUBMB Life, September 2024, Wiley

    Oscar Vargas

  7. The central role of transfer RNAs in mistranslation

    Article • Journal of Biological Chemistry, September 2024, Elsevier

    Oscar Vargas

  8. AARS Online: a collaborative database on the structure, function, and evolution of the aminoacyl-tRNA synthetases

    Article • May 2024, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press

    Oscar Vargas

  9. Dual incorporation of non-canonical amino acids enables production of post-translationally modified selenoproteins

    Article • Frontiers in Molecular Biosciences, January 2023, Frontiers

    Oscar Vargas

  10. Diversification of aminoacyl-tRNA synthetase activities via genomic duplication

    Article • Frontiers in Physiology, August 2022, Frontiers

    Oscar Vargas

  11. Uncovering translation roadblocks during the development of a synthetic tRNA

    Article • Nucleic Acids Research, July 2022, Oxford University Press (OUP)

    Oscar Vargas

  12. The tRNA discriminator base defines the mutual orthogonality of two distinct pyrrolysyl-tRNA synthetase/tRNAPyl pairs in the same organism

    Article • Nucleic Acids Research, April 2022, Oxford University Press (OUP)

    Oscar Vargas

  13. Bacterial translation machinery for deliberate mistranslation of the genetic code

    Article • Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, August 2021, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

    Sergey Melnikov, Oscar Vargas

  14. Genetic Encoding of Three Distinct Noncanonical Amino Acids Using Reprogrammed Initiator and Nonsense Codons

    Article • December 2020, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press

    Oscar Vargas

  15. Human trans-editing enzyme displays tRNA acceptor-stem specificity and relaxed amino acid selectivity

    Article • Journal of Biological Chemistry, November 2020, Elsevier

    Oscar Vargas

  16. A cysteinyl-tRNA synthetase variant confers resistance against selenite toxicity and decreases selenocysteine misincorporation

    Article • Journal of Biological Chemistry, July 2019, American Society for Biochemistry & Molecular Biology (ASBMB)

    Oscar Vargas

  17. Plasticity and Constraints of tRNA Aminoacylation Define Directed Evolution of Aminoacyl-tRNA Synthetases

    Article • International Journal of Molecular Sciences, May 2019, MDPI AG

    Oscar Vargas

  18. Recoding of the selenocysteine UGA codon by cysteine in the presence of a non-canonical tRNACys and elongation factor SelB

    Article • RNA Biology, June 2018, Taylor & Francis

    Oscar Vargas

  19. Effects of Heterologous tRNA Modifications on the Production of Proteins Containing Noncanonical Amino Acids

    Article • Bioengineering, February 2018, MDPI AG

    Oscar Vargas

  20. Engineering posttranslational proofreading to discriminate nonstandard amino acids

    Article • Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, January 2018, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

    Oscar Vargas

  21. Double mimicry evades tRNA synthetase editing by toxic vegetable-sourced non-proteinogenic amino acid

    Article • Nature Communications, December 2017, Springer Science + Business Media

    Oscar Vargas

  22. Correction for Danhart et al., Conformational and chemical selection by a trans -acting editing domain

    Article • Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, November 2017, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

    Oscar Vargas

  23. A genomically modified Escherichia coli strain carrying an orthogonal E. coli histidyl-tRNA synthetase•tRNA His pair

    Article • Biochimica et Biophysica Acta (BBA) - General Subjects, November 2017, Elsevier

    Oscar Vargas

  24. The central role of tRNA in genetic code expansion

    Article • Biochimica et Biophysica Acta (BBA) - General Subjects, November 2017, Elsevier

    Oscar Vargas

  25. Transfer RNAs with novel cloverleaf structures

    Article • Nucleic Acids Research, October 2016, Oxford University Press (OUP)

    Oscar Vargas, Dr Nikos C Kyrpides

  26. Emergent rules for codon choice elucidated by editing rare arginine codons in Escherichia coli

    Article • Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, September 2016, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

    Oscar Vargas

  27. Homologous trans -editing factors with broad tRNA specificity prevent mistranslation caused by serine/threonine misactivation

    Article • Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, April 2015, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

    Oscar Vargas

  28. Ancestral AlaX Editing Enzymes for Control of Genetic Code Fidelity Are Not tRNA-specific

    Article • Journal of Biological Chemistry, February 2015, American Society for Biochemistry & Molecular Biology (ASBMB)

    Oscar Vargas

  29. Wobble puts RNA on target

    Article • Nature, June 2014, Springer Science + Business Media

    Oscar Vargas

  30. Distinct tRNA recognition strategies used by a homologous family of editing domains prevent mistranslation

    Article • Nucleic Acids Research, December 2013, Oxford University Press (OUP)

    Oscar Vargas

  31. Exclusive Use oftrans-Editing Domains Prevents Proline Mistranslation

    Article • Journal of Biological Chemistry, April 2013, American Society for Biochemistry & Molecular Biology (ASBMB)

    Oscar Vargas