Author name: Oscar Ting

Introduction In all forms of life, the ribosome is responsible for protein biosynthesis. In eukaryotes the 80S ribosome (70S in bacteria) is comprised of a large subunit (60S for eukaryotes and 50S for prokaryotes) and a small subunit (40S for eukaryotes and 30S for prokaryotes) (1). During ribosome profiling (RP),  the removal of rRNA from

A Beginner’s Guide to Polyamines What are they? Polyamines are short organic molecules which have at least 2 amino (-NH2) groups. They are found in both bacteria and eukaryotes, and are ubiquitously expressed in cell types, and are likely to be important for basic cellular functions. Polyamines are able to bind to a variety of

Mini-Review: Ribosome Profiling Introduction TDP-43 is by far the most common factor associated with ALS, with aggregations of the protein being observed in in ~97% of cases, be they sporadic or familial in origin (2). Recent evidence suggests that the impact of these aggregates results from a loss of normal function of this protein, as

Cell Specificity in Translation Transcription and translation are often thought to be coupled processes, with a rise in mRNA transcripts typically associated with an increase in translation. And while this is generally the case, specific cellular requirements often result in the decoupling of these processes, partially in order to bring about phenotypic change more rapidly

Mini-Review: Alternative Proteoform Prediction It has been estimated that there are approximately 20,000 protein-coding genes in humans, however, when considering splice variants, the number of proteins can be estimated at around 70,000. Moreover, post-translational modifications including phosphorylation, glycosylation, among many others, can also produce thousands of protein variants. Each of these forms of expressed proteins

Mini-Review: Ribosome Profiling Introduction Ribosome Profiling (Ribo-seq) is a deep-sequencing technique developed by Nicholas Ingolia and Jonathan Weissman that facilitates a genome-wide view of translation in vivo (1).  This technique is based on the principle that translating ribosomes cover a short stretch of mRNA (~30 nucleotides) that is resistant to RNase degradation (2) commonly referred to