The process of mRNA-tRNA translocation

As the initially low-resolution maps gave way to density maps in the subnanometer range, evidence of conformational changes both in the ribosome and its ligands was uncovered, and qualitative descriptions were increasingly replaced by quantitative measurements based on fitting and docking of x-ray structures. As a result, we can begin to piece together mechanistic models that explain kinetic, genetic, and other data collected over the five decades of ribosome research in structural terms.