This new lengths of transcripts is actually defined with respect to successive ribosomal footprints (Roentgen
Our TASEP implementation considers individual ribosome transitions along mRNA transcripts that belong to four classes: three of these are “endogenous” and therefore native to the cell (ribosomal (R), enzymatic (E), housekeeping (Q)), while one is unnaturally engineered into the cell (“heterologous” (H)). f), where 1 R f equates to 30 nucleotides , making each Rf account for 10 amino acids. As in , each transcript contains 30 successive footprints (900 nucleotides), except for R proteins, which contain 750 footprints (22,500 nucleotides), to reflect that ribosomes are multi-protein complexes requiring more resources to build [54,55]. While modelling mRNA degradation, “ribosome protection” is considered whereby transcripts cannot be degraded unless they are free from ribosomes. We focus our core results on a simple scenario that highlights the effects of ribosomal queues in order to clearly observe their impact. This illustrative scenario considers one slow codon with a relative efficiency of 0.5% at position 26 R f on a transcript of length 30 R f . Other positions and efficiencies were also explored, and are reported in the Supplementary Information (Figure S2).