Landscapes of gene translation in hepatocellular carcinoma tumors revealed by ribosome profiling

Despite the critical role of translation in the multi-level gene expression regulation program that controls the protein abundance, a high-resolution view on the landscapes of gene translation in cancer has been missing. We used the technique of ribosome profiling to dissect the translatomes of human liver tumors and their adjacent normal tissues. Our results, as a novel resource, revealed genome-wide abnormalities of translation efficiencies in tumors and context-dependent non-canonical ORFs. We profiled the paired tumor and adjacent normal tissue samples from 10 patients of HCC by the procedure of ribosome profiling, which was adapted and optimized for processing of clinical solid tissue samples. Total RNA sequencing was performed in parallel for the same samples.