Li Gene-Wei
Department of Biology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139, United States.
Curr Opin Microbiol. 2015 Apr;24:66-71. doi: 10.1016/j.mib.2015.01.001. Epub 2015 Jan 28.
Bacterial proteins are translated with precisely determined rates to meet cellular demand. In contrast, efforts to express recombinant proteins in bacteria are often met with large unpredictability in their levels of translation. The disconnect between translation of natural and synthetic mRNA stems from the lack of understanding of the strategy used by bacteria to tune translation efficiency (TE). The development of array-based oligonucleotide synthesis and ribosome profiling provides new approaches to address this issue. Although the major determinant for TE is still unknown, these high-throughput studies point out a statistically significant but mild contribution from the mRNA secondary structure around the start codon. Here I summarize those findings and provide a theoretical framework for measuring TE.
细菌蛋白质以精确确定的速率进行翻译，以满足细胞需求。相比之下，在细菌中表达重组蛋白的努力往往在其翻译水平上遭遇很大的不可预测性。天然mRNA和合成mRNA翻译之间的脱节源于对细菌用于调节翻译效率（TE）的策略缺乏了解。基于阵列的寡核苷酸合成和核糖体谱分析的发展为解决这一问题提供了新方法。尽管TE的主要决定因素仍然未知，但这些高通量研究指出起始密码子周围的mRNA二级结构有统计学上显著但微弱的贡献。在此，我总结这些发现，并提供一个测量TE的理论框架。
