Monitoring Protein Synthesis One Codon at a Time Through Ribosome Profiling 

The ability to sequence genomes has far outstripped approaches for deciphering the information they encode.

The presentation will include a discussion of a suite of techniques developed at UCSF/HHMI based on ribosome profiling (deep sequencing of ribosome protected fragments) that dramatically expand our ability to follow translation in vivo.

Dr. Weissman will present recent applications of their ribosome profiling approach including the following:

• Development of ribosome profiling protocols for a wide variety of eukaryotic and prokaryotic organisms.
• Uses of ribosome profiling to globally monitor when chaperones, targeting factors or processing enzymes engage nascent chains.
• Deciphering the driving force and biological consequences underlying the choice of synonymous codons.
• Define the protein coding potential of complex genomes.

Speakers

Jonathan Weissman, Ph.D., HHMI Investigator, University of California-San Francisco/HHMI

Jonathan Weissman is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator and Professor of Cellular and Molecular Pharmacology and of Biochemistry and Biophysics at the University of California, San Francisco. He received his undergraduate physics degree from Harvard College. After obtaining a Ph.D. in Physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he worked with Peter Kim, Dr. Weissman pursued postdoctoral fellowship training in Arthur Horwich’s laboratory at Yale University School of Medicine. Dr. Weissman’s numerous honors include the 2008 Raymond and Beverly Sackler International Prize in Biophysics, as well as election to the National Academy of Sciences and to the American Academy of Microbiology.

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Nicholas Ingolia, Ph.D., Principal Investigator, Carnegie Institution for Science

Nicholas Ingolia received his S.B. in Biology and Mathematics from MIT and completed his Ph.D. in Biology from Harvard University. Presently, Dr. Ingolia is a principal investigator at the Carnegie Institution for Science and serves as an adjunct assistant professor at Johns Hopkins University and Johns Hopkins Medical Institute. During this period he was offered several fellowships and honors including the NIH NRSA postdoctoral fellowship, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute predoctoral fellowship, the NSF graduate research fellowship (declined) and is currently a Searle Scholar.

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Scott Kuersten, Ph.D., Staff Scientist, Epicentre, an Illumina Company

Dr. Scott Kuersten received his B. of Sc. in chemistry from the University of Alaska-Fairbanks and his PhD from Indiana University-Bloomington in Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology. He was a post-doc at the European Molecular Biology Laboratories in Heidelberg, Germany and in the Dept. of Genetics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Scott is currently a Staff Scientist for Product Development at Epicentre (An Illumina Company).

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