What is nonsense-mediated decay, why is it important, and what is a proposed mechanism as to how it works?

What will be an ideal response?


Nonsense-mediated decay is a type of RNA surveillance that identifies mRNA with premature stop codons and eliminates them. Nonsense-mediated decays are important because mRNAs with premature stop codons will usually make nonfunctional proteins that could be harmful or it's just a waste of cellular energy to make a protein that is not functional. How the cell identifies this nonsense-containing mRNAs is not yet known, but a model is that the cell can recognize such mRNAs due to the large distance between the poly-A tail and the stop codon (usually this distance is relatively short).

Biology & Microbiology

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