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The effect of the nucleotides immediately upstream of the AUG start codon on the efficiency of translation initiation in sperm cells

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Abstract

It is widely known that an optimal nucleotide sequence context immediately upstream of the AUG start codon greatly improves the efficiency of translation initiation of mRNA in mammalian and plant somatic cells, which in turn increases protein levels. However, it is still unclear whether a similar regulatory mechanism is also present in highly differentiated cells. Here, we surveyed this issue in Arabidopsis thaliana sperm cells and found that the sequence context-mediated regulation of translation initiation in sperm cells is generally similar to that in somatic cells. A simple motif of four adenine nucleotides at positions − 1 to − 4 greatly improved the efficiency of translation initiation, and when the motif was present there, translation was even initiated at some non-AUG codons in sperm cells. However, unlike that in mammalian cells, a mainly effective nucleotide site to regulate the efficiency of translation initiation was not present at positions − 1 to − 4 in sperm cells. Meanwhile, different from somatic cells, sperm cells did not use eukaryotic translation initiation factor 1 to regulate the efficiency in a poor context consisting of the lowest frequency nucleotides. All these results contribute to our understanding of the cytoplasmic event of translation initiation in highly differentiated sperm cells.

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Acknowledgements

We thank Dr. Frédéric Berger (National University of Singapore) for kindly providing the HTR10:nRFP seeds.

Funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (31870297 to DYW).

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Author notes

  1. Jiao-Jiao Shi and Yuan Cao have contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Key Laboratory of Resource Biology and Biotechnology in Western China (Ministry of Education), College of Life Science, Northwest University, Xi’an, 710069, China

    Jiao-Jiao Shi, Yuan Cao, Qiu-Hua Lang, Yao Dong, Liu-Yuan Huang, Liu-Jie Yang, Jing-Jing Li, Xue-Xin Zhang & Dan-Yang Wang

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  1. Jiao-Jiao Shi
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  2. Yuan Cao
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Correspondence to Dan-Yang Wang.

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Shi, JJ., Cao, Y., Lang, QH. et al. The effect of the nucleotides immediately upstream of the AUG start codon on the efficiency of translation initiation in sperm cells. Plant Reprod 35, 221–231 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00497-022-00442-7

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