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Making sense of nonsense

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Eukaryotic mRNAs containing nonsense codons are degraded by nonsense-mediated mRNA decay (NMD). In humans, NMD was proposed to act exclusively on newly synthesized mRNA during a 'pioneer round' of translation, when mRNA is associated with the nuclear cap-binding complex (CBC). Two reports now challenge this view, revealing that NMD is independent of whether CBC or the cytoplasmic cap-binding protein (eIF4E) promotes translation and can occur later in an mRNA's life.

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Figure 1: NMD on CBC- and eIF4E-bound mRNA targets.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Matthias W. Hentze is at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory, Heidelberg, Germany.,

    Matthias W Hentze

  2. Elisa Izaurralde is at the Department of Biochemistry, Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology, Tübingen, Germany.,

    Elisa Izaurralde

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  1. Matthias W Hentze
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  2. Elisa Izaurralde
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Correspondence to Matthias W Hentze or Elisa Izaurralde.

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Hentze, M., Izaurralde, E. Making sense of nonsense. Nat Struct Mol Biol 20, 651–653 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1038/nsmb.2601

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