Immune cells tied to heart patients ’ increased risk of shingles

Researchers at the School of Medicine have discovered an unexpected layer in the regulation of gene expression. The finding will likely disrupt scientists’ understanding of how cells regulate their genes to develop, communicate and carry out specific tasks throughout the body. The researchers found that cellular workhorses called ribosomes, which are responsible for transforming genes encoded in RNA into proteins, display a never-beforeimagined variety in their composition that significantly affects their function. In particular, the protein components of a ribosome serve to tune the tiny machine so that it specializes in the translation of genes in related cellular pathways. One type of ribosome, for example, prefers to translate genes involved in cellular differentiation, while another specializes in genes that carry out essential metabolic duties. The discovery is shocking because researchers have believed for decades that ribosomes functioned like tiny automatons, showing no preference as they translated any and all nearby RNA molecules into proteins. Now it appears that broad variation in protein production could be sparked not by changes in the expression levels of thousands of individual genes, but instead by small tweaks to ribosomal proteins.