2024.03.27
Research by Assistant Professor Yokoyama and colleagues on the nutrient concentration sensing mechanism of plant ribosomes, published in Nature Chemical Biology.
A research group including Assistant Professor Takeshi Yokoyama (Structural Biology Group), Graduate School of Agricultural and Life Sciences, The University of Tokyo, and RIKEN, has revealed a new mechanism of translation initiation regulation in plants in response to boron, via the AUG-stop sequence based on structural and biochemical analyses and published in Nature Chemical Biology.
Through this mechanism, plants regulate the absorption of nutrients from the soil and maintain normal growth.
Soil nutrients are essential for plant growth and crop production, but the available soil nutrient concentrations are not always adequate for plants. Plants subjected to inadequate nutrient conditions may increase the number of transporters used to get nutrients into their roots in order to better absorb the missing nutrients. In order for plants to increase their transporter accumulation in response to nutritional conditions, they need to sense the nutritional conditions. Previous work by the authors has shown that ribosomes, which are intracellular protein synthesis factories, act as sensors of cytoplasmic boron concentrations, and alter the synthesis of specific proteins to increase the accumulation of transporters for the absorption of boron. However, the mechanism responsible for this boron-sensing function of ribosomes had not been elucidated.
In this study, the research team succeeded for the first time to visualize boron-induced ribosome stagnation at high resolution, using state-of-the-art cryo-electron microscopy installed in INGEM, Tohoku University. Through molecular, structural and biochemical analyses of boron-fed ribosomes, it became clear that boron alters the behavior of ribosomes and thereby regulates the amount of transporter protein synthesis.
This paper was published in Nature Chemical Biology on January 24, 2024.
Publication Details
Title:Boric acid intercepts 80S ribosome migration from AUG-stop by stabilizing eRF1
Authors:Mayuki Tanaka#, Takeshi Yokoyama#, Hironori Saito#, Madoka Nishimoto, Kengo Tsuda, Naoyuki Sotta, Hideki Shigematsu, Mikako Shirouzu, Shintaro Iwasaki*, Takuhiro Ito*, and Toru Fujiwara*
#Co-first author
*Corresponding author
Journal: Nature Chemical Biology
Published date: January 24, 2024
DOI: 10.1038/s41589-023-01513-0