Joshua Jones

Supervisor: Dr Ian Brierley

It has long been known that the position of a translating ribosome can be precisely determined through the discrete, ~30 nucleotide, fragment protected from nuclease digestion by the ribosome. Developing this, in 2009 the first ribosome profiling study was published (Ingolia et al., 2009). Ribosome profiling is a technique to globally analyse ribosome protected fragments (RPFs), using the latest advances in sequencing technology to provide a high resolution analysis of the location of translating ribosomes on the transcriptome at any one time. A higher number of RPFs centred on a codon reflects how often a ribosome is found at that point. Therefore, RPFs which are overrepresented, when mapped back to the transcriptome, indicate sites of ribosomal pausing (Ingolia et al., 2010).

Through the identification of ribosome pause sites profiling also has the capacity to reveal many examples of novel translational phenomena. My research uses ribosome profiling to investigate novel translational phenomena in viruses where a pause is known or thought to be important, such as programmed ribosomal frameshifting or stop codon readthrough.