Elongation, a crucial step in the translation process of protein synthesis, gets disrupted by amino acid sequences with an abundance of N-terminal aspartic and glutamic acid residues in eukaryotic cells, discovered researchers. The team’s findings show that these ‘risky’ amino acids can destabilize the ribosomal machinery. As a consequence, most proteomes tend to avoid incorporating them at the N-terminals of peptide sequences, indicating a bias in amino acid distribution.