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. 2017 Jan 31;6:e22037. doi: 10.7554/eLife.22037

Figure 3. Translational efficiency (TE) is highly correlated with ORF mRNA structure.

(A) Plots comparing the Gini indices of ORFs in polycistronic operons calculated from in vivo DMS-seq to their TEs (N = 483). (B) Histograms of TE ratios between adjacent non-overlapping (N = 253) or overlapping (N = 73) ORFs in operons (see Materials and methods for details). Overlapping ORFs are ORF pairs for which the annotated stop codon of the upstream ORF overlaps or is 3’ of the start codon of the downstream ORF. (C–E) Plots comparing the Gini indices of endogenous ORF mRNAs calculated from DMS-seq data of: C. in vivo RNA; D. in vivo RNA with no translating ribosomes (Ksg treated cells); E. in vitro modified refolded mRNA, to their TEs. For this and all subsequent panels, data calculated using different sets of ORFs are summarized in Supplementary file 13. (F) Plot comparing computationally predicted mRNA structure (- minimum free energy / nucleotide; -ΔG/nt) of the entire ORF body to TE. (G) Plots of the difference in the Gini index between untranslated (ksg-treated) and translated in vivo mRNA against their TE for the 465 ORFs in both datasets. X-axis: Gini index (in vivo untranslated) – Gini index (in vivo), normalized by the average of the two.

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.7554/eLife.22037.006

Figure 3.

Figure 3—figure supplement 1. Correlation between the mRNA structural level and translation efficiency.

Figure 3—figure supplement 1.

(A) An example showing the results of mRNA-seq, ribosome profiling and DMS-seq of the rpsF-priB-rpsR-rplI operon, with translation efficiency (TE) and Gini index of each ORF indicated. (B) Plot of Gini index of unmodified mRNA (using the DMS sequencing library preparation protocol but without DMS treatment) calculated across the entire ORF body against TE. (C) Bar plot comparing the absolute value of Spearman’s rank correlation coefficient (ρ) between TE and mRNA structure of different portions of ORF mRNAs in vivo (blue), in vivo no ribosome (ksg-treated; green) and in vitro (red). The portions of ORFs analyzed are shown schematically with the black bars underneath the ORF. The actual correlation between TE and in vivo ORF-wide RNA structure is indicated.