Ribosome profiling of HEK293 cells.

The development of the ribosome profiling (ribo-seq) technique has enabled the measurement of translation at a genome-wide level. There are several variants of the ribosome profiling technique that use different translation inhibitors. The regular ribo-seq utilizes Cycloheximide (CHX), a translation elongation inhibitor to freeze all translating ribosomes. In contrast to CHX, the translation inhibitor lactimidomycin (LTM) and harringtonine (Harr) have a much stronger effect on initiating ribosomes. The use of these inhibitors allows for the global mapping of translating initiating sites (TISs) when they are coupled with ribosome profiling (TI-seq). We have developed a computational tool to detect and/or quantitatively compare translation initiation from TI-seq data, and predict novel ORFs from regular CHX-based ribo-seq data. Two replicates of CHX-based ribo-seq experiments and one Harr based ribo-seq were performed in HEK293 cells for confirming the ORFs predicted using public available data. Ribosome protected fragments were extracted from HEK293 cells treated with cycloheximide or harringtonine plus cycloheximide.