School of Mathematics

Juraj Szavits-Nossan

Predicting mRNA translation rates from coding DNA sequences

Protein synthesis - a process of turning genetic information into functional macromolecules - is of paramount importance to every living cell. In this talk I will overview mathematical models of mRNA translation, which is the final stage of protein synthesis. Until recently, these models had very limited power in predicting determinants of translation efficiency (the amount of proteins produced per mRNA per time), owning to the fact that their nonequilibrium steady state is generally unknown. Here, I will present a perturbative method to find their nonequilibrium steady state when the initiation rate for mRNA translation is small, which is often the case.