Figure 3.

Ribosome profiling enables quantitative proteomic discovery in diverse systems. a) Bacterial cells translate components of multi-member protein complexes in ratios that are proportional to their stoichiometry in these complexes. A notable example is the F_oF₁ ATP synthetase, which is composed of 8 different proteins (A to H) translated from a single operon. mRNA abundance for each gene is thus similar, but ribosome profiling reveals intricate translational control. Modified with permission from ref⁵¹b) Zebrafish zygotic development requires the initiation of zygotic transcription 2 hours post fertilization (hpf), although the specific transcription factors responsible for this transcription have been unclear. Ribosome profiling of embryos at 2 hpf showed the three most highly translated transcription factors (TFs) from maternal messages were Nanog, Sox19b, and Pou5f1 and subsequent experiments confirmed that these three proteins drive zygotic activation. Modified with permission from ref⁵⁴