Ribosome profiling reveals conserved guanosine residues at ribosome pausing sites in Bacillus subtilis
Ribosome pausing slows down translation and can affect protein synthesis. Improving translation efficiency can therefore be of commercial value. Here, we investigated the occurrence of ribosome pausing during amylase secretion by the industrial production organism Bacillus subtilis under semi fed-batch fermentation conditions. We first assessed our ribosome profiling setup by inducing ribosome stalling at isoleucine codons using the antibiotic mupirocin, and found a pause preference for isoleucine codons preceded by E and P site codons with guanosine residues in their first nucleotide position. Interestingly, when we applied standard ribosomal profiling conditions we found again an enrichment of guanosine residues in the E and P site of ribosome pause sites, but this time also upstream of the ribosome pause site. This sequence motif deviates from previously described ribosome pausing motifs. For the highly expressed amylase gene amyM several strong ribosome pausing sites were detected, which remained present during the 64-hour long fermentation, and were neither related to rare codons nor to secondary protein structures. When surveying the genome, an interesting finding was the presence of strong ribosome pausing sites in several toxins genes. These potential ribosome stall sites may function in preventing inadvertent activity in the cytosol.