11.3: What Have We Learned?

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Hopefully at the end of this chapter we have come to realize the importance in transcriptional regulation. We see that mRNA levels are not 1:1 with protein levels. Additionally, we saw that the genetic code is not universal, and what are considered preferred tRNA-codon pairs are dynamic. Likewise, synonymous mutations are not equivalent across species. We have seen how powerful the technique of ribosome profiling is, as it allows us to measure translation with subcodon resolution. Despite all this, it is possible to model translation and codon evolutions using tools to help increase translation efficiency/folding of proteins in heterologous systems, predict coding regions, understand cell type-specific translation patterns, and compare translation between healthy and disease states. Finally, by analyzing translational regulation, we see how protein levels are tuned, and we see that there are many different ways to achieve post-transcriptional regulation. Perhaps we may come to realize that there is more interconnection between these different regulation strategies than we originally thought.