Ribosome profiling of WT strain in Neurospora crass
Codon usage bias, which refers to uneven use of synonymous codons, was shown to associate with mRNA stability from yeast to human. However, the underlying molecular basis is largely unknown. With bioinformatic analyses we unexpectedly found that codon usage bias is inversely correlated to density of out-of-frame stop codons (hidden stop codon or HSC). To understand the physiological function of HSCs, we use the frequency gene of Neurospora crassa to examine the role of HSCs in circadian rhythm. We show that deleting HSCs in the upstream of frequency (frq) open reading frame without altering FRQ sequence resulted in loss of circadian rhythm. Further analyses revealed that HSC deletion of frq resulted in elevated stability of frq mRNA, which consequently causes higher FRQ protein level. Combined various methods, we showed that rare codons in the upstream frq region generates significant amount of aberrant translation at +1 frame, possibly via ribosomal frameshifting. Consistently, at genome wide we showed that both in N. crassa and S. cerevisiae, the codon usage bias combined with numbers of HSC are inversely correlated to mRNA stability. Together, these data indicate that HSCs might act as an intrinsic mechanism to terminate aberrant ribosomal frameshifting events triggered by non-optimal codons, thus fine-tune mRNA stability. Overall design: Ribosome profiling of a Neurospora crassa wt strain was performed to get its translational landscape.