Nonsense-mediated mRNA decay of collagen -emerging complexity in RNA surveillance mechanisms

Abstract

Nonsense-mediated mRNA decay (NMD) is an evolutionarily conserved mRNA surveillance system that degrades mRNA transcripts that harbour a premature translation-termination codon (PTC), thus reducing the synthesis of truncated proteins that would otherwise have deleterious effects. Although extensive research has identified a conserved repertoire of NMD factors, these studies have been performed with a restricted set of genes and gene constructs with relatively few exons. As a consequence, NMD mechanisms are poorly understood for genes with large 39 terminal exons, and the applicability of the current models to large multi-exon genes is not clear. In this Commentary, we present an overview of ..