School research highlighted on the front cover of the journal Nucleic Acid Research

Cover of Nucleic Acids Research (courtesy of Oxford University Press)

School research highlighted on the front cover of the journal Nucleic Acid Research

Research from members of The School of Life Sciences has been published on the front cover of Volume 50, Issue 4 of Nucleic Acid Research.

The work led at Nottingham by Dr Mary J. O'Connell with collaborators at the University of Leeds have published ground-breaking work in their paper “Ribosome heterogeneity in Drosophila melanogaster gonads through paralog-switching”.

Speaking about this research, Dr O’Connell says “When we think of ribosomes the undergraduate text book definition usually springs to mind first - homogeneous macromolecular machines whose role it is to translate mRNA into protein. But they are far more complex than this. Here we show that ribosomes are quite heterogeneous. We show how paralog-enrichment and paralog-switching results in alterations to the surface of the ribosome allowing different proteins to regulate translation and propelling the ribosome into a new realm – as a regulator of translation.”