Selenocysteine is a rare amino acid that is incorporated into a few
proteins using the codon UGA. Normally UGA is stop
codon, but the proteins that use UGA for selenocysteine
usually have mRNA with significant
secondary structure around the UGA. This may cause the ribosome to not recognize the
UGA as a stop codon, allowing the selenocysteinyl-tRNA
to incorporate the amino acid at that point.