Nonsense-mediated mRNA Decay and Cancer

Nonsense-mediated mRNA decay among coagulation factor genes

Objective(s): Haemostasis prevents blood loss following vascular injury. It depends on the unique concert of events involving platelets and specific blood proteins, known as coagulation factors. The clotting system requires precise regulation and coordinated reactions to maintain the integrity of the vasculature. Clotting insufficiency mostly occurs due to genetically inherited coagulation fact...

Nonsense-mediated mRNA decay.

Translation and mRNA decay are coupled processes; the link is most obvious in the case of NMD (nonsense-mediated mRNA decay). NMD is a mechanism that drastically reduces the level of mRNA harbouring PTCs (premature translation termination codons). The defining event in NMD is premature translation termination and the key question is: what distinguishes premature from normal translation terminat...

Nonsense-mediated mRNA decay

Is it important? Absolutely! NMD probably evolved to eliminate abnormal transcripts due to routine errors in gene expression. For example, inefficient or inaccurate pre-mRNA splicing can generate an intron-derived in frame nonsense codon, or a shift in the reading frame and an exon-derived nonsense codon downstream of the shift. There are also natural substrates for NMD such as alternatively sp...

SnapShot: Nonsense-Mediated mRNA Decay

Aberrant mRNA transcripts and nonsense-mediated decay

Nobody's perfect, and even the cell turns out a certain fraction of erroneous mRNA transcripts. One of the key quality control mechanisms put in place to recognize and eliminate these transcripts before they can be translated into faulty proteins is nonsense-mediated decay. Proteins involved in nonsense-mediated decay are highly conserved across species from plants to humans, and recent studies...