Light-Dependent Translation Change of Arabidopsis Correlates with RNA Structure Alterations at the Translation Initiation Region.

mRNA secondary structure influences translation. Proteins that modulate the mRNA secondary structure around the translation initiation region may regulate translation in plastids. To test this hypothesis, we exposed to high light, which induces translation of mRNA encoding the D1 subunit of photosystem II. We assayed translation by ribosome profiling and applied two complementary methods to analyze in vivo RNA secondary structure: DMS-MaPseq and SHAPE-seq. We detected increased accessibility of the translation initiation region of after high light treatment, likely contributing to the observed increase in translation by facilitating translation initiation. Furthermore, we identified the footprint of a putative regulatory protein in the 5' UTR of at a position where occlusion of the nucleotide sequence would cause the structure of the translation initiation region to open up, thereby facilitating ribosome access. Moreover, we show that other plastid genes with weak Shine-Dalgarno sequences (SD) are likely to exhibit -like regulation, while those with strong SDs do not. This supports the idea that changes in mRNA secondary structure might represent a general mechanism for translational regulation of and other plastid genes.