Highly accessible translation initiation sites are predictive of successful heterologous protein expression
Recombinant protein production is a key process in generating proteins of interest in the pharmaceutical industry and biomedical research. However, about 50% of recombinant proteins fail to be expressed in a variety of host cells. To address this problem, we modified up to the first nine codons of messenger RNAs with synonymous substitutions and showed that protein levels can be tuned. These modifications alter the accessibility of translation initiation sites. We also reveal the dynamics between accessibility, gene expression, and turnovers using a coarse-grained simulation.
bioinformatics↗