BBB webinar: Eivind Valen

Eivind Valen
Computational Biology Unit, Department of Informatics, and Sars International Centre for Marine Molecular Biology, University of Bergen

The efficiency by which an mRNA produces proteins depends on the number of ribosomes that it can recruit, the success of the ribosomes in navigating its 5’ untranslated region (UTR) and whether they recognize its start codon. Initiation of translation is a rate limiting step in protein synthesis and key to gene expression control, but despite this centrality it remains poorly understood. In this talk, I will introduce a method to capture the transcriptome-wide occupancy of scanning, initiating, elongating and terminating ribosome complexes to track these across all transcripts. This new perspective allows us to deconstruct the regulatory contributions from the three stages of initiation: ribosome recruitment, scanning of the 5’UTR and recognition of the start codon, and ultimately identify key regulatory mechanisms at each step.

Chairperson: Nils Halberg, Department of Biomedicine