Dr. Juan Mata, Department of Chemistry, University of Cambridge
Tuesday 26th January, 1.00 p.m., Cornwallis Octagon Lecture Theatre 2
Sexual development in the fission yeast Schizosaccharomyces pombe culminates in meiosis and sporulation. We used an approach termed ribosome profiling to investigate the translational landscape of this process. We found that the translation efficiency of hundreds of genes is regulated in complex patterns, often correlating with changes in RNA levels. We also used the data to validate and correct genome annotations, to discover novel translated regions, to examine if so-called ‘non-coding RNAs’ are translated, and to identify regulatory regions on mRNAs. Overall we identified over 900 unannotated translated regions of 20 codons or more (including many on non-coding RNAs), suggesting that the complexity of the fission yeast proteome is much higher than expected.