This webinar outlines a study that combined genome-wide and classical molecular approaches to demonstrate that translation strongly affects mRNA stability in a codon-dependent manner, ultimately influencing mRNA and protein levels in higher organisms.
Ribosomes are the most abundant RNA-binding structures in the cell, and while their main function is to decode nucleotides into amino acid sequences, translation can also affect mRNA stability depending on codon composition. This regulatory pathway is different from codon usage or bias and is known as "codon optimality," defined as the property of given codons to regulate mRNA stability in a translation-dependent manner.
In this webinar, Ariel Bazzini of the Stowers Institute for Medical Research details a study that took three independent approaches in different human cells. The team measured the decay of existing mRNAs by performing time-course RNA-seq; measured mRNA stability independent of untranslated regions (UTRs) using a vector-based library termed ORFome; and measured mRNA stability without blocking mRNA transcription using a method called SLAM-seq.
Dr. Bazzini discusses the study's findings, which provide valuable insights into a novel and powerful regulatory pathway that may be an underlying cause of misregulated gene expression in human conditions and diseases.