Following Ribosome Footprints to Understand Translation at a Genome Wide Level

Protein translation is a key step in gene expression. The development of Ribosome Profiling has allowed the global analysis of this process at sub-codon resolution. In the last years the method has been applied to several models ranging from bacteria to mammalian cells yielding a surprising amount of insight on the mechanism and the regulation of translation. In this review we describe the key aspects of the experimental protocol and comment on the main conclusions raised in different models.