Clustered codons that pair to low-abundance tRNA isoacceptors can form slow-translating regions in the mRNA and cause transient ribosomal arrest. We report that folding efficiency of the Escherichia coli multidomain protein SufI can be severely perturbed by alterations in ribosome-mediated translational attenuation. Such alterations were achieved by global acceleration of the translation rate with tRNA excess in vitro or by synonymous substitutions to codons with highly abundant tRNAs both in vitro and in vivo. Conversely, the global slow-down of the translation rate modulated by low temperature suppresses the deleterious effect of the altered translational attenuation pattern. We propose that local discontinuous translation temporally separates the translation of segments of the peptide chain and actively coordinates their co-translational folding.

As a well-known phenomenon, total mRNAs poorly correlate to proteins in their abundances as reported. Recent findings calculated with bivariate models suggested even poorer such correlation, whereas focusing on the translating mRNAs (ribosome nascent-chain complex-bound mRNAs, RNC-mRNAs) subset. In this study, we analysed the relative abundances of mRNAs, RNC-mRNAs and proteins on genome-wide scale, comparing human lung cancer A549 and H1299 cells with normal human bronchial epithelial (HBE) cells, respectively. As discovered, a strong correlation between RNC-mRNAs and proteins in their relative abundances could be established through a multivariate linear model by integrating the mRNA length as a key factor. The R2 reached 0.94 and 0.97 in A549 versus HBE and H1299 versus HBE comparisons, respectively. This correlation highlighted that the mRNA length significantly contributes to the translational modulation, especially to the translational initiation, favoured by its correlation with the mRNA translation ratio (TR) as observed. We found TR is highly phenotype specific, which was substantiated by both pathway analysis and biased TRs of the splice variants of BDP1 gene, which is a key transcription factor of transfer RNAs. These findings revealed, for the first time, the intrinsic and genome-wide translation modulations at translatomic level in human cells at steady-state, which are tightly correlated to the protein abundance and functionally relevant to cellular phenotypes.

Translational systems can respond promptly to sudden environmental changes to provide rapid adaptations to environmental stress. Unlike the well-studied translational responses to oxidative stress in eukaryotic systems, little is known regarding how prokaryotes respond rapidly to oxidative stress in terms of translation. In this study, we measured protein synthesis from the entire Escherichia coli proteome and found that protein synthesis was severely slowed down under oxidative stress. With unchanged translation initiation, this slowdown was caused by decreased translation elongation speed. We further confirmed by tRNA sequencing and qRT-PCR that this deceleration was caused by a global, enzymatic downregulation of almost all tRNA species shortly after exposure to oxidative agents. Elevation in tRNA levels accelerated translation and protected E. coli against oxidative stress caused by hydrogen peroxide and the antibiotic ciprofloxacin. Our results showed that the global regulation of tRNAs mediates the rapid adjustment of the E. coli translation system for prompt adaptation to oxidative stress.

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