Regensburg 2016 – scientific programme

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BP: Fachverband Biologische Physik

BP 59: DNA, RNA and Related Enzymes

BP 59.5: Talk

Thursday, March 10, 2016, 10:45–11:00, H45

The TASEP with reinitiation before the steady state — David W. Rogers, •Marvin A. Böttcher, Arne Traulsen, and Duncan Greig — Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology, Plön, Germany

The totally asymmetric simple exclusion process (TASEP) was initially developed as a stochastic model for mRNA translation. It has subsequently attracted a lot of attention, since it can be applied to a variety of systems, including molecular transport, traffic, or spread of epidemics, and can be solved analytically in multiple cases. However, recent experimental evidence for the translation process shows a negative correlation between transcript length and observables such as ribosome density, protein abundance and codon adaption, which can not be explained with the original TASEP.

We examine the influence of ribosome reinitiation on translation, that is the finishing ribosome directly initiates again without leaving into the ribosome pool, by using an implementation of the TASEP with the Gillespie algorithm. In contrast to previous work we explicitly take the initial phase into account, before steady state is reached. Thereby we demonstrate that reinitation leads to a strong length dependency on both ribosome density on the transcript and protein yield consistent with current experimental evidence, allowing powerful prediction of translational regulation across eukaryotes.