Shu-Hsing Wu

1 Introduction The eukaryotic ribosomes are composed of two subunits designated as 40S small and 60S large subunits, together comprising four ribosomal RNAs (18S, 5S, 5.8S, 28S), and 79–80 ribosomal proteins (Wilson and Doudna Cate 2012). Post-translational modification of the ribosomal proteins, including acetylation (Liew and Gornall 1973), methylation (Kruiswijk et al. 1978), phosphorylation (Kabat 1970), and hydroxylation (Loenarz et al.

Abstract Gene expression is prone to burst production, making it a highly noisy process that requires additional controls. Upstream open reading frames (uORFs) are widely present in the 5′ leader sequences of 30–50% of eukaryotic messenger RNAs1,2,3. The translation of uORFs can repress the translation efficiency of the downstream main coding sequences.