This webinar aimed to promote interest in Ribosome profiling - a powerful, yet specialised genome-wide technique to capture global translation (i.e. protein synthesis) at any given time.

The two invited speakers, Drs Allen Buskirk and Noam Stern-Ginossar, are prominent world leaders in the study of bacterial and viral translation dynamics, respectively, and have made extensive use of ribosome profiling in their work. By applying a modified ribosome profiling protocol to bacterial genetic mutants, Dr Buskirk and his group have recently revealed that the translation start site in bacteria is hard-wired, independently of the Shine-Dalgarno motif. In the world of virology, besides recent revelations on the coding capacity of the SARS-CoV-2, Dr Stern-Ginossar was the first to apply ribosome profiling to a virus, notably human cytomegalovirus where she revealed hundreds of novel viral elements such as small upstream open reading frames, revealing unanticipated complexity to the HCMV coding capacity.

This webinar was chaired by Dr Betty Chung, Principal investigator in the Department of Pathology at the University of Cambridge (UK).