Cell paper combines computational and experimental biology to demonstrate new regulatory mechanism
Department of Biological Sciences faculty member Partho Sarothi Ray has recently co-authored a paper in the prestigious journal Cell [Yao P., Potdar A.A., Arif A., Ray P.S., Mukhopadhyay R., Willard B., Xu Y., Yan J., Saidel G.M. and Fox, P.L. (2012) Coding region polyadenylation generates a truncated tRNA synthetase that counters translation repression. Cell 149, 88-100] which describes a new mechanism of generating new proteins by converting a stop codon into an amino acid-encoding codon by adding an alternative poly-adenine tail to an mRNA. The significance of the study lies in the fact that the discovery is based on computational modeling of a translation regulatory system which was observed to give a constant low level of translation of a protein, vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF), even when the synthesis of the protein was inhibited. This is one of the first studies which have utilized computational modeling together with experimental validation to discover a new molecular mechanism, emphasizing the interdisciplinary nature of scientific discovery today.