News Releases & Research Results Discovery of a new molecular mechanism determining messenger RNA stability: New machinery for monitoring the critical process of gene expression

The results of international collaborative research conducted by Professor Toshifumi Inada and Associate Professor Yoshitaka Matsuo of Tohoku University Graduate School of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Professor Roland Beckmann of the University of Munich in Germany, Professor Jeff Coller of Case Western Reserve University, and others.

• The research group demonstrated by genetic/biochemical functional analyses that codon optimality, which determines the stability of mRNAs (*1) causing various diseases, is monitored by the Ccr4-Not complex (*2) involved in mRNA degradation.
  *1: The abbreviation of messenger RNAs, which refers to the RNAs that carry genetic information that serves as blueprints for protein synthesis
  *2: A protein complex involved in transcriptional regulation and mRNA degradation as a gene expression
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• The research group also elucidated the binding mode of the Ccr4–Not complex to the ribosome (*3) through a single-particle analysis using cryo-electron microscopy.
  *3: The machinery for synthesizing proteins by linking amino acids together according to the genetic information carried by mRNAs. 
• The results of research should contribute to elucidation of the mechanism of onset of diseases with unidentified causes.

This research project was conducted with the support of the Advanced Research and Development Programs for Medical Innovation (AMED-CREST) by AMED.

The results of research were published in Science, an American scientific journal, on April 18.

Inada T., et al. The Ccr4-Not complex monitors the translating ribosome for codon optimality The FASEB Journal
DOI：10.1126/science.aay6912