Aberrant mRNA transcripts and nonsense-mediated decay.
Nobody's perfect, and even the cell turns out a certain fraction of erroneous mRNA transcripts. One of the key quality control mechanisms put in place to recognize and eliminate these transcripts before they can be translated into faulty proteins is nonsense-mediated decay. Proteins involved in nonsense-mediated decay are highly conserved across species from plants to humans, and recent studies in Arabidopsis thaliana reveal both intriguing similarities and differences in the mechanisms employed to carry it out.
Department of Cellular & Molecular Medicine and Ottawa Institute of Systems Biology, University of Ottawa 451 Smyth Road, Ottawa, ON K1H 8M5 Canada. ltrinkle@uottawa.ca
Laura
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Trinkle-Mulcahy