Does mRNA structure contain genetic information for regulating co-translational protein folding?

Currently many facets of genetic information are ill-defined. In particular, how protein folding is genetically regulated has been a long-standing issue for genetics and protein biology. And a generic mechanistic model with supports of genomic data is still lacking. Recent technological advances have enabled much needed genome-wide experiments. While focusing on the effect of codon optimality, these studies have supplied mounting evidence suggesting a role of mRNA structure in the regulation of protein folding by modulating translational elongation rate. In conjunctions with previous theories, this mechanistic model of protein folding guided by mRNA structure shall expand our understandings of genetic information and offer new insights into various biomedical puzzles.

Keywords
Translational elongation rate; Protein folding; mRNA secondary structure; Codon usage bias