“…The latter is mediated by structured regions of RNA termed internal ribosome entry segments (IRES), and these have the ability to direct ribosome binding some considerable distance (up to 1000 nts) from the 5' end of the message. IRESs were originally discovered in picornaviral mRNAs, but have now been identi®ed in a number of eukaryotic mRNAs, the protein products of which are involved in the control of cell growth including, FGF-2 (Vagner et al, 1995), VEGF (Miller et al, 1998;Stein et al, 1998), PDGF (Bernstein et al, 1997) and c-myc (Nanbru et al, 1997;Stoneley et al, 1998) and cell death Holcik et al, 1999). In the case of c-myc we have shown that initiation of protein synthesis can occur by two distinct mechanisms; cap-dependent scanning and IRES mediated .…”