Skip to main content
Intellect

BYU scientists find gene sequences that stall protein synthesis

Machines don’t always run smoothly – phone calls drop, computers crash and cars stall.

A new Brigham Young University study shows the same kinds of problems happen to the molecular machinery within our cells.

Known as ribosomes, these machines crank out the proteins that do nearly everything cells need to survive: Move things around, speed up chemical reactions to get energy from food, even make and copy DNA.

With all that ribosomes do right, it’s only now coming to light how much can go wrong. As BYU biochemists report this month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, these biological machines are just as prone to failure as man-made machines.

“Biologists tend to think of the ribosome as capable of making anything,” said BYU professor and study author Allen Buskirk. “They think that ribosomes don’t care what sequence you give them – that they just make whatever you tell them to make. And that’s not true.”

Even in a simple bacterial cell, there are thousands of different proteins, each made up of amino acids linked together end to end. Ribosomes have to build all these proteins accurately and quickly, using information copied off of DNA as messenger RNA to determine which amino acid goes where.

Buskirk and his students found a variety of amino acid sequences that cause ribosomes to move in fits and starts or completely stall. Some of it may be strategic – buying time for the protein to fold properly as it comes off the ribosome, or regulating the expression of nearby genes in response to changing conditions in the cell.

In other cases, however, it seems more like a bug in the system. Buskirk and his co-authors explain in the new study how cells recover from those setbacks with systems that alleviate stalling or rescue stalled ribosomes.

BYU Ph.D. student Chris Woolstenhulme co-authored the paper with Buskirk. The two of them are pursuing follow-up studies this year at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Four BYU students who worked on the project as undergraduates also appear as co-authors: Shankar Parajuli, David Healey, Diana Valverde and Nicholas Petersen.

70s_openbook_nolabels[1].jpg
Photo by Image courtesy of Harry Noller, UC Santa Cruz

Related Articles

data-content-type="article"

BYU origami-inspired chair design featured on Mark Rober’s Top 10 list

November 07, 2024
A futuristic BYU-designed, origami-inspired Flex Chair, cut out of a single piece of flat material and folded into shape, has made YouTuber Mark Rober’s Top 10 list. In a Nov. 2 video post, Rober spotlights the chair at #7 on his list of Crunch Lab builds in the past year, and credits BYU compliant mechanisms researchers for the innovative design.
overrideBackgroundColorOrImage= overrideTextColor= overrideTextAlignment= overrideCardHideSection=false overrideCardHideByline=false overrideCardHideDescription=false overridebuttonBgColor= overrideButtonText= overrideTextAlignment=
data-content-type="article"

BYU and the U: Rivals on the field, teammates in the lab

November 07, 2024
Over the past 10 years, BYU professors coauthored a staggering 1,388 publications with colleagues at the University of Utah. While athletic competitions between the two schools produce a lot of headlines, academic collaborations produce a lot of research.
overrideBackgroundColorOrImage= overrideTextColor= overrideTextAlignment= overrideCardHideSection=false overrideCardHideByline=false overrideCardHideDescription=false overridebuttonBgColor= overrideButtonText= overrideTextAlignment=
data-content-type="article"

BYU engineers, Toyota partner to create ‘new standard in automotive manufacturing’

October 28, 2024
A new welding technique developed by BYU and Toyota for the Sienna’s sliding doors uses 40 times less energy, emits fewer emissions, and produces welds that are 10 times stronger. This new process, called refill friction stir spot welding, could prove critical as Toyota and other car manufacturers rely more and more on lighter aluminum parts.
overrideBackgroundColorOrImage= overrideTextColor= overrideTextAlignment= overrideCardHideSection=false overrideCardHideByline=false overrideCardHideDescription=false overridebuttonBgColor= overrideButtonText= overrideTextAlignment=
overrideBackgroundColorOrImage= overrideTextColor= overrideTextAlignment= overrideCardHideSection=false overrideCardHideByline=false overrideCardHideDescription=false overridebuttonBgColor= overrideButtonText=