Dissecting ribosome assembly and transport in budding yeast

Construction of the eukaryotic ribosome begins in the nucleolus and requires >300 evolutionarily conserved nonribosomal trans-acting factors, which transiently associate with preribosomal subunits at distinct assembly stages. A subset of trans-acting and transport factors passage assembled preribosomal subunits in a functionally inactive state through the nuclear pore complexes (NPC) into the cytoplasm, where they undergo final maturation before initiating translation. Here, we summarize the repertoire of tools developed in the model organism budding yeast that are spearheading the functional analyses of trans-acting factors involved in the assembly and intracellular transport of preribosomal subunits. We elaborate on different GFP-tagged ribosomal protein reporters and a pre-rRNA reporter that reliably monitors the movement of preribosomal particles from the nucleolus to cytoplasm. We discuss the powerful yeast heterokaryon assay, which can be employed to uncover shuttling trans-acting factors that need to accompany preribosomal subunits to the cytoplasm to be released prior to initiating translation. Moreover, we present two biochemical approaches, namely sucrose gradient analyses and tandem affinity purification, that are rapidly facilitating the uncovering of regulatory processes that control the compositional dynamics of trans-acting factors on maturing preribosomal particles. Altogether, these approaches when combined with traditional analytical biochemistry, targeted proteomics and structural methodologies, will contribute to the dissection of the assembly and intracellular transport of preribosomal subunits, as well as other macromolecular assemblies that influence diverse biological pathways.