Redefining the translational status of 80S monosomes

Fully assembled ribosomes exist in two populations: polysomes and monosomes. While the former has been studied extensively, to what extent translation occurs on monosomes and its importance for overall translational output remains controversial. Here, we used ribosome profiling to examine the translational status of 80S monosomes in Saccharomyces cerevisiae. We found that the vast majority of 80S monosomes are elongating, not initiating. Further, most mRNAs exhibit some degree of monosome occupancy, with monosomes predominating on nonsense-mediated decay (NMD) targets, upstream open reading frames (uORFs), canonical ORFs shorter than ~590 nucleotides and ORFs for which the total time required to complete elongation is substantially shorter than that required for initiation. Importantly, mRNAs encoding low-abundance regulatory proteins tend to be enriched in the monosome fraction. Our data highlight the importance of monosomes for the translation of highly regulated mRNAs.  Overall design: We examined the translational status of single 80S ribosomes using ribosome profiling, and compared these monosome footprints to both polysome ribosome footprints and general ribosome profiling. RNASeq libraries were also prepared from the overall sample input.