Project description:The control of mRNA stability plays a central role in regulating gene expression. In metazoans, the earliest stages of development are driven by maternally supplied mRNAs. The degradation of these maternal mRNAs is critical for promoting the maternal-to-zygotic transition of developmental programs, although the underlying mechanisms are poorly understood in vertebrates. Here, we characterized maternal mRNA degradation pathways in zebrafish using a transcriptome analysis and systematic reporter assays. Our data demonstrate that ORFs enriched with uncommon codons promote deadenylation by the CCR4-NOT complex in a translation-dependent manner. This codon-mediated mRNA decay is conditional on the context of the 3â² UTR, with long 3â² UTRs conferring resistance to deadenylation. These results indicate that the combined effect of codon usage and 3â² UTR length determines the stability of maternal mRNAs in zebrafish embryos. Our study thus highlights the codon-mediated mRNA decay as a conserved regulatory mechanism in eukaryotes. zebrafish embryonic mRNA profile at 2 different stages (2 hpf and 6 hpf) in wildtype and 3 additional conditions (miR-430 inhibition, RNApol II inhibition and CNOT7 inhibition) at 6 hpf. All experiments are performed as triplicates
Project description:The control of mRNA stability plays a central role in regulating gene expression. In metazoans, the earliest stages of development are driven by maternally supplied mRNAs. The degradation of these maternal mRNAs is critical for promoting the maternal-to-zygotic transition of developmental programs, although the underlying mechanisms are poorly understood in vertebrates. Here, we characterized maternal mRNA degradation pathways in zebrafish using a transcriptome analysis and systematic reporter assays. Our data demonstrate that ORFs enriched with uncommon codons promote deadenylation by the CCR4-NOT complex in a translation-dependent manner. This codon-mediated mRNA decay is conditional on the context of the 3′ UTR, with long 3′ UTRs conferring resistance to deadenylation. These results indicate that the combined effect of codon usage and 3′ UTR length determines the stability of maternal mRNAs in zebrafish embryos. Our study thus highlights the codon-mediated mRNA decay as a conserved regulatory mechanism in eukaryotes.
Project description:mRNA translation decodes nucleotide into amino acid sequences. However, translation has also been shown to affect mRNA stability depending on codon composition in model organisms, although universality of this mechanism remains unclear. Here, using three independent approaches to measure exogenous and endogenous mRNA decay, we define which codons are associated with stable or unstable mRNAs in human cells. We demonstrate that the regulatory information affecting mRNA stability is encoded in codons and not in nucleotides. Stabilizing codons tend to be associated with higher tRNA levels and higher charged/total tRNA ratios. While mRNAs enriched in destabilizing codons tend to possess shorter poly(A)-tails, the poly(A)-tail is not required for the codon-mediated mRNA stability. This mechanism depends on translation; however, the number of ribosome loads into a mRNA modulates the codon-mediated effects on gene expression. This work provides definitive evidence that translation strongly affects mRNA stability in a codon-dependent manner in human cells.
Project description:Ribosome profiling data reports on the distribution of translating ribosomes, at steady-state, with codon-level resolution. We present a robust method to extract codon translation rates and protein synthesis rates from these data, and identify causal features associated with elongation and translation efficiency in physiological conditions in yeast. We show that neither elongation rate nor translational efficiency is improved by experimental manipulation of the abundance or body sequence of the rare AGG tRNA. Deletion of three of the four copies of the heavily used ACA tRNA shows a modest efficiency decrease that could be explained by other rate-reducing signals at gene start. This suggests that correlation between codon bias and efficiency arises as selection for codons to utilize translation machinery efficiently in highly translated genes. We also show a correlation between efficiency and RNA structure calculated both computationally and from recent structure probing data, as well as the Kozak initiation motif, which may comprise a mechanism to regulate initiation. We test whether tRNA abundance affects elongation or translation efficiency by changing the tRNA levels through deletion or over expression and measuring the ribosomal dwell time at each codon using a robust statistical method that accounts for flow conservation.
Project description:Codon usage bias is a universal feature of eukaryotic and prokaryotic genomes and has been proposed to regulate translation efficiency, accuracy and protein folding based on the assumption that codon usage affects translation dynamics. The role of codon usage in regulating translation, however, is not clear and has been challenged by recent ribosome profiling studies. Here we used a Neurospora cell-free translation system to directly monitor the velocity of mRNA translation. We demonstrated that the use of preferred codons enhances the rate of translation elongation, whereas non-optimal codons slow translation. In addition, codon usage regulates ribosome traffic on the mRNA. These conclusions were supported by ribosome profiling results in vitro and in vivo with substrate mRNAs manipulated to increase signal over background noise. We further show that codon usage plays an important role in regulating protein function by affecting co-translational protein folding. Together, these results resolve a long-standing fundamental question and demonstrate the importance of codon usage on protein folding.
Project description:In yeast and mammals, activated GCN2 can phosphorylate its substrate eIF2α, which is a part of the eIF2-GTP-Met-tRNAiMet ternary complex. The eIF2α phosphorylation blocks the ternary complex formation and therefore inhibits translation initiation. Meanwhile, GCN2 activation associates with ribosomes and some translation elongation factors such as eEF1A. In Neurospora crassa, the homolog of GCN2 is CPC-3. Ribosome profiling and accompanying RNA-seq experiments in this project were used to explore the effects of CPC-3 on translation kinetics. Here we show that poor codon usage of mRNAs with long CDS preferentially causes CPC-3 activation, which in turn suppresses the translation initiation and elongation in both codon usage and CDS length dependent manner.
Project description:The control of mRNA stability plays a central role in regulating gene expression patterns. While much is known about the roles of 5´ and 3´ untranslated regions in the mRNA stability control, the impact of protein-coding sequences on mRNA stability had been obscure. Recently, several groups reported that codon composition in the ORF affects mRNA deadenylation and degradation rates in a translation-dependent manner. Hence, codons define not only the amino acid sequences to be synthesized but also the stability of mRNAs. However, how 61 codons differently affect mRNA stability remains unclear. Besides, aberrant stalling of the ribosome induces ribosome quality control (RQC) and No-go decay. The relationship between the two co-translational mRNA decay pathways is not systematically analyzed. To precisely characterize the effects of 61 codons on mRNA stability, we developed a simplified reporter system that allows detection of the effect of every single codon on mRNA stability in zebrafish embryos. Using this system, we show that the effect of codons on mRNA stability is partially but significantly correlated with the translation elongation rate and tRNA abundance. Interestingly, the codon effect is still maintained in zebrafish embryos lacking Znf598, an essential mediator of RQC and NGD. Znf598-dependent NGD targets a particular type of ribosome stalling but has limited impact on endogenous mRNA stability. Our study thus defines two related co-translational mRNA decay pathways during animal development.
Project description:Messenger RNA (mRNA) stability substantially impacts steady-state gene expression levels in a cell. mRNA stability is strongly affected by codon composition in a translation-dependent manner across species, through a mechanism termed codon optimality. We have developed iCodon (www.iCodon.org), an algorithm for customizing mRNA expression through the introduction of synonymous codon substitutions into the coding sequence. iCodon is optimized for four vertebrate transcriptomes: mouse, human, frog, and fish. Users can predict the mRNA stability of any coding sequence based on its codon composition and subsequently generate more stable (optimized) or unstable (deoptimized) variants encoding for the same protein. Further, we show that codon optimality predictions correlate with both mRNA stability using a massive reporter library and expression levels using fluorescent reporters and analysis of endogenous gene expression in zebrafish embryos and/or human cells. Therefore, iCodon will benefit basic biological research, as well as a wide range of applications for biotechnology and biomedicine.