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Updated: Jul 10, 2026

Genome-wide Quantification of Translation in Budding Yeast by Ribosome Profiling
Published on: December 21, 2017
Absolute Quantification of Protein and mRNA Abundances Demonstrate Variability in Gene-Specific Translation
Petri-Jaan Lahtvee1, Benjamín J Sánchez1, Agata Smialowska2
1Department of Biology and Biological Engineering, Systems and Synthetic Biology, Chalmers University of Technology, Kemivägen 10, 412 96 Gothenburg, Sweden; Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Biosustainability, Chalmers University of Technology, 412 96 Gothenburg, Sweden.
Abstract:
Protein synthesis is the most energy-consuming process in a proliferating cell, and understanding what controls protein abundances represents a key question in biology and biotechnology. We quantified absolute abundances of 5,354 mRNAs and 2,198 proteins in Saccharomyces cerevisiae under ten environmental conditions and protein turnover for 1,384 proteins under a reference condition. The overall correlation between mRNA and protein abundances across all conditions was low (0.46), but for differentially expressed proteins (n = 202), the median mRNA-protein correlation was 0.88. We used these data to model translation efficiencies and found that they vary more than 400-fold between genes. Non-linear regression analysis detected that mRNA abundance and translation elongation were the dominant factors controlling protein synthesis, explaining 61% and 15% of its variance. Metabolic flux balance analysis further showed that only mitochondrial fluxes were positively associated with changes at the transcript level. The present dataset represents a crucial expansion to the current resources for future studies on yeast physiology.
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