News

Congratulations to Hiro Wakabayashi on publishing his paper about the effect of Shine-Dalgarno sequences on ribosome translocation in Journal of Molecular Biology.

The Mathews and Ermolenko labs have recently showed that RNAs universally fold into secondary structures with short end-to-end distances. In this new article, possible roles of the inherent mRNA compactness in translation and mRNA decay are reviewed.

Chen Bao

In a new paper just published in the journal eLife, the Ermolenko lab in collaboration with the Grigorieff lab at HHMI uncovers the underlying mechanism by which secondary structure in mRNA causes ribosome pausing. Specifically they show that mRNA stem-loops can cause translation pausing by inhibiting binding of tRNAs to the A site of the ribosome. The lead author on the work is Chen Bao, a Biochemistry graduate student. The work was funded by NIH.