NON-CANONICAL TRANSLATION INITIATION DURING STRESS

mRNA translation is an energy expensive process, and is tightly regulated during stress in order to conserve resources. One way in which this is accomplished is by limiting the availability of initiator methionine required for kickstarting most new protein synthesis. Even under such limiting conditions, some mRNAs manage to be translated. To understand how this happens, we used stress response reporters to screen for regulators of this process. This led to the identification of eIF2D and DENR-MCTS1 as translation factors that act as non-canonical initiator methionine carriers during stress. See PMC7495428 for details. On going projects include characterizing other new regulators identified in the extended genetic screen.