The Stormo Lab published a paper in Communications Biology, “Autoregulation of yeast ribosomal proteins discovered by efficient search for feedback regulation.” The lab used the yeast GFP collection as a rapid screen for genes exhibiting feedback regulation and tested all of the ribosomal protein genes in our collection. Thirty percent of them showed at least a 3-fold repression when a non-regulatable version of the gene was induced. The lab followed up the two genes with the highest degree of repression, over 10-fold, to learn the mechanism. In both cases the 5’UTR contains the regulatory site for autoregulation by the protein. In one case splicing, which is required for translation, is inhibited by the protein. In the other case translation is blocked directly by the protein binding to a sequence/structure motif that is conserved, in both rRNA and mRNA, from bacteria to mammals.
Basab Roy, a postdoc in the Stormo Lab, is lead author on the paper. Gary Stormo, PhD, the Joseph Erlanger Professor in the Department of Genetics and the Center for Genome Sciences and Systems Biology at Washington University School of Medicine, and Michael White, PhD, Assistant Professor of Genetics at Washington University School of Medicine, are senior authors. Congratulations, all!