Translation efficiency is maintained during heat shock in Escherichia coli

We utilize ribosome profiling to directly monitor translation in E. coli at 30 °C and investigate how this changes after 10-20 minutes of heat shock at 42 °C. Translation is controlled by the interplay of several RNA hybridization processes, which are expected to be temperature sensitive. We observe that translation efficiencies are robustly maintained after thermal heat shock and after mimicking the heat shock response transcriptional program at 30 °C. Ribosome profiling and RNA-seq analysis of E. coli was used to measure translation efficiency. The effect of heat shock was measured under 3 conditions (n=3); overexpression of wildtype (n=3) or constitutively active mutant (n=2) heat shock transcription factor rpoH was compared to cells expressing empty vector (n=4).