Related papers: Ribosome collisions and Translation efficiency: Op…
During mRNA translation, several ribosomes attach to the same mRNA molecule simultaneously translating it into a protein. This pipelining increases the protein production rate. A natural and important question is what ribosomal density…
Motivated by recent experiments on an antibiotic resistance gene, we investigate genetic interactions between synonymous mutations in the framework of exclusion models of translation. We show that the range of possible interactions is…
Protein translation is one of the most important processes in cell life but, despite being well understood biochemically, the implications of its intrinsic stochastic nature have not been fully elucidated. In this paper we develop a…
We explore and quantify the physical and biochemical mechanisms that may be relevant in the regulation of translation. After elongation and detachment from the 3' termination site of mRNA, parts of the ribosome machinery can diffuse back to…
The process of polymerizing a protein by a ribosome, using a messenger RNA (mRNA) as the corresponding template, is called {\it translation}. Ribosome may be regarded as a molecular motor for which the mRNA template serves also as the…
In bacteria such as $\textit{Escherichia coli}$, DNA is compacted into a nucleoid near the cell center, while ribosomes$-$molecular complexes that translate messenger RNAs (mRNAs) into proteins$-$are mainly localized at the poles. We study…
X-ray data indicate that complexes of ribosomes with cognate and near cognate tRNAs are very similar structurally, and this was the ground for a suggestion that the ribosome discriminates correct codon-anticodon pair because of its higher…
To double the cellular population of ribosomes, a fraction of the active ribosomes is allocated to synthesize ribosomal proteins. Subsequently, these ribosomal proteins enter the ribosome self-assembly process, synthesizing new ribosomes…
Deprivation of essential nutrients can have stark consequences for many processes in a cell. We consider amino acid starvation, which can result in bottlenecks in mRNA translation when ribosomes stall due to lack of resources, i.e. tRNAs…
We develop a stochastic model for the programmed frameshift of ribosomes synthesizing a protein while moving along a mRNA template. Normally the reading frame of a ribosome decodes successive triplets of nucleotides on the mRNA in a…
Protein synthesis rates are determined, at the translational level, by properties of the transcript's sequence. The efficiency of an mRNA can be tuned by varying the ribosome binding sites controlling the recruitment of the ribosomes, or…
The ribosomal density along the coding region of the mRNA molecule affect various fundamental intracellular phenomena including: protein production rates, organismal fitness, ribosomal drop off, and co-translational protein folding. Thus,…
The ribosome flow model (RFM) is a phenomenological model for the unidirectional flow of particles along a 1D chain of $n$ sites. The RFM has been extensively used to study the dynamics of ribosome flow along a single mRNA molecule during…
We develop a method for solving mathematical models of messenger RNA (mRNA) translation based on the totally asymmetric simple exclusion process (TASEP). Our main goal is to demonstrate that the method is versatile and applicable to…
During the initiation stage of protein synthesis, a ribosomal initiation complex (IC) is assembled on a messenger RNA (mRNA) template. In bacteria, the speed and accuracy of this assembly process are regulated by the complementary…
Translation is an important stage in gene expression. During this stage, macro-molecules called ribosomes travel along the mRNA strand linking amino-acids together in a specific order to create a functioning protein. An important question…
Translation is the cellular process in which ribosomes make proteins from information encoded on messenger RNA (mRNA). We model translation with an exclusion process taking into account the experimentally determined, non-exponential,…
Down regulation of mRNA translation is an important problem in various bio-medical domains ranging from developing effective medicines for tumors and for viral diseases to developing attenuated virus strains that can be used for…
We construct an algorithm that generates large, band-diagonal transition matrices for a totally asymmetric exclusion process (TASEP) with local hopping rate inhomogeneities. The matrices are diagonalized numerically to find steady-state…
Translation is one of the most fundamental processes in the biological cell. Because of the central role that translation plays across all domains of life, the enzyme that carries out this process, the ribosome, is required to process…