Genetic influences on translation in yeast

Frank W. Albert, Dale Muzzey, Jonathan Weissman, Leonid Kruglyak
(Submitted on 13 Mar 2014)

Heritable differences in gene expression between individuals are an important source of phenotypic variation. The question of how closely the effects of genetic variation on protein levels mirror those on mRNA levels remains open. Here, we addressed this question by using ribosome profiling to examine how genetic differences between two strains of the yeast S. cerevisiae affect translation. Strain differences in translation were observed for hundreds of genes, more than half as many as showed genetic differences in mRNA levels. Similarly, allele specific measurements in the diploid hybrid between the two strains revealed roughly half as many cis-acting effects on translation as were observed for mRNA levels. In both the parents and the hybrid, strong effects on translation were rare, such that the direction of an mRNA difference was typically reflected in a concordant footprint difference. The relative importance of cis and trans acting variation on footprint levels was similar to that for mRNA levels. Across all expressed genes, there was a tendency for translation to more often reinforce than buffer mRNA differences, resulting in footprint differences with greater magnitudes than the mRNA differences. A reanalysis of two earlier studies which reported translational buffering between two yeast species showed that translational reinforcement is in fact more common between these species, consistent with our results. Finally, we catalogued instances of premature translation termination in the two yeast strains. Overall, genetic variation clearly influences translation, but primarily does so by subtly modulating differences in mRNA levels. Translation does not appear to create strong discrepancies between genetic influences on mRNA and protein levels.