In this review, we provide an overview of protein synthesis in the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae The mechanism of protein synthesis is well conserved between yeast and other eukaryotes, and molecular genetic studies in budding yeast have provided critical insights into the fundamental process of translation as well as its regulation. The review focuses on the initiation and elongation phases o...

Translation of SecM stalls unless its N-terminal part is "pulled" by the protein export machinery. Here we show that the sequence motif FXXXXWIXXXXGIRAGP that includes a specific arrest point (Pro) causes elongation arrest within the ribosome. Mutations that bypass the elongation arrest were isolated in 23S rRNA and L22 r protein. Such suppressor mutations occurred at a few specific residues of...

In nature, bacteria frequently experience many adverse conditions, including heat, oxidation, acidity, and hyperosmolarity, which all tend to slow down if not outright stop cell growth. Previous work on bacterial stress mainly focused on understanding gene regulatory responses. Much less is known about how stresses compromise protein synthesis, which is the major driver of cell growth. Here, we...

Experimental data indicate that stochastic effects exerted at the level of translation contribute substantially to the variation in abundance of proteins expressed at moderate to high levels. This study analyzes the theoretical consequences of fluctuations in residue-specific elongation rates during translation. A simple analytical framework shows that rate variation during elongation gives ris...

The previously observed (Walter, et al. 1981 J. Cell Biol. 91:545-550) inhibitory effect of SRP selectively on the cell-free translation of mRNA for secretory protein (preprolactin) was shown here to be caused by a signal sequence-induced and site-specific arrest in polypeptide chain elongation. The Mr of the SRP-arrested nascent preprolactin chain was estimated to be 8,000 corresponding to app...

Ribosome stalling during translation has recently been shown to cause neurodegeneration, yet the signaling pathways triggered by stalled elongation complexes are unknown. To investigate these pathways we analyzed the brain of C57BL/6J-Gtpbp2(nmf205)(-/-) mice in which neuronal elongation complexes are stalled at AGA codons due to deficiencies in a tRNA(Arg)UCU tRNA and GTPBP2, a mammalian ribos...

The elongation phase of translation is promoted by three universal elongation factors, EF-Tu, EF-Ts, and EF-G in bacteria and their homologs in archaea and eukaryotes. Recent findings demonstrate that the translation of a subset of mRNAs requires a fourth elongation factor, EF-P in bacteria or the homologs factors a/eIF5A in other kingdoms of life. EF-P prevents the ribosome from stalling durin...