Dynamics in Translation Elongation Rates During the Yeast Meiosis Selectively Regulate Gene Expression

Meiosis in the budding yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae is a cell division process in which diploid yeast cells sporulate to produce four haploid cells. Gene expression regulation during meiosis and specifically, translational control has a great impact on all aspects of cellular development and sexual reproduction. During the past few years, the development of Ribosome profiling experiments significantly broadens our understanding of translational control during different cellular processes. These approaches, however, are limited mainly to a subset of relatively highly expressed genes, include information related to all translation stages and are proned to various biases. Here, we perform for the first time a multidimensional computational study of translation elongation dynamics of all yeast genes over the yeast meiosis. Among others, we show that the elongation phase alone captures clusters of functionally related genes with a stage-specific elongation efficiency. One prominent cluster, for example, was composed of relatively lowly expressed genes that showed an increase in elongation efficiency at the points of DNA replication and the second anaphase and indeed included critical DNA replication factors and proteins involved in sister chromatids segregation. Our findings demonstrate the unique functional role of the elongation phase in the dynamic control of mRNA translation during the yeast meiotic sporulation program.