Readthrough events in plants reveal unprecedented plasticity of stop codons

Title : Readthrough events in plants reveal unprecedented plasticity of stop codons

Abstract:

Stop codon readthrough (SCR) has important biological implications but remains largely uncharacterized in plants. Here, we identify 1,009 SCR events in plants using a proteogenomic strategy. Plant SCR candidates tend to have shorter transcript lengths, fewer exons and splice variants than non-SCR transcripts. Surprisingly, mass spectrometry evidence reveal that stop codons involved in SCR events can be recoded as 20 standard amino acids, some of which are also supported by suppressor transfer RNA analysis. We also observe multiple functional signals in 34 maize extended proteins and characterize the structural and subcellular localization changes in the extended protein of basic transcription factor 3. Furthermore, the SCR events exhibit non-conserved signature and the extensions likely undergo protein- coding selection. Overall, our study not only demonstrates that SCR events are commonly present in plants but also reveals the unprecedented recoding plasticity of stop codons, which provides important insights into the flexibility of genetic decoding.

Biography:

Dr. Liuji Wu received her PhD degree from Zhejiang University in 2009, and later conducted collaborative research as a visiting scholar at Huazhong Agricultural University and the University of California, San Diego. She is currently a professor at Henan Agricultural University, focusing on the discovery and functional characterization of non-canonical proteins and peptides, particularly in maize stress resistance. Dr. Liuji Wu has published more than 35 research articles as the first or corresponding author in high- impact SCI journals, providing new insights into plant proteome diversity and novel mechanisms of plant stress resistance.