A pause for thought along the co-translational folding pathway

A unifying concept that combines the basic features governing self-organization of proteins into complex three-dimensional structures in vitro and in vivo is still lacking. Recent experimental results and theoretical in silico modeling studies provide evidence showing that mRNA might contain an addi...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Trends in biochemical sciences (Amsterdam. Regular ed.) 2009, Vol.34 (1), p.16-24
Main Author: Komar, Anton A.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Animals
Codon
Humans
Kinetics
Models, Biological
Models, Molecular
Molecular Conformation
Phenotype
Protein Conformation
Protein Folding
Protein Structure, Tertiary
Proteins - chemistry
Ribosomes - chemistry
Ribosomes - metabolism
RNA, Messenger - metabolism
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Summary:A unifying concept that combines the basic features governing self-organization of proteins into complex three-dimensional structures in vitro and in vivo is still lacking. Recent experimental results and theoretical in silico modeling studies provide evidence showing that mRNA might contain an additional layer of information, beyond the amino acid sequence, that fine-tunes in vivo protein folding, which is largely believed to start as a co-translational process. These findings indicate that translation kinetics might direct the co-translational folding pathway and that translational pausing at rare codons might provide a time delay to enable independent and sequential folding of the defined portions of the nascent polypeptide emerging from the ribosome.
ISSN:0968-0004
1362-4326
DOI:10.1016/j.tibs.2008.10.002