Institute of Plant and Microbial Biology, Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan.
Genome and Systems Biology Degree Program, Academia Sinica and National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan.
Nat Plants. 2022 May;8(5):474-480. doi: 10.1038/s41477-022-01136-8. Epub 2022 May 2.
Gene expression is prone to burst production, making it a highly noisy process that requires additional controls. Upstream open reading frames (uORFs) are widely present in the 5' leader sequences of 30-50% of eukaryotic messenger RNAs. The translation of uORFs can repress the translation efficiency of the downstream main coding sequences. Whether the low translation efficiency leads to a different variation, or noise, in gene expression has not been investigated, nor has the direct biological impact of uORF-repressed translation. Here we show that uORFs achieve low but precise protein production in plant cells, possibly by reducing the protein production rate. We also demonstrate that, by buffering a stable TIMING OF CAB EXPRESSION 1 (TOC1) protein production level, uORFs contribute to the robust operation of the plant circadian clock. Our results provide both an action model and the biological impact of uORFs in translational control to mitigate transcriptional noise for precise protein production.
基因表达容易产生爆发式生产，这是一个高度嘈杂的过程，需要额外的控制。上游开放阅读框（uORFs）广泛存在于 30-50%的真核生物信使 RNA 的 5' 先导序列中。uORFs 的翻译可以抑制下游主要编码序列的翻译效率。uORF 抑制翻译是否导致基因表达的不同变化或噪声，以及 uORF 抑制翻译的直接生物学影响，尚未得到研究。在这里，我们表明 uORFs 在植物细胞中实现了低但精确的蛋白质生产，可能是通过降低蛋白质产生速率来实现的。我们还证明，通过缓冲稳定的 TIMING OF CAB EXPRESSION 1（TOC1）蛋白的产生水平，uORFs 有助于植物生物钟的稳健运作。我们的研究结果为 uORFs 在减轻转录噪声以实现精确蛋白质生产的翻译控制中的作用模型和生物学影响提供了证据。
