Identification of Global Alteration of Translational Regulation in Glioma In Vivo

Post-transcriptional regulation of gene expression contributes to the protein output of a cell, however, methods for measuring translational regulation in complex in vivo systems are lacking. Here, we describe a sensitive method for measuring translational regulation in defined cell populations from heterogeneous tissue in vivo. We adapted the translating ribosome affinity purification (TRAP) methodology to measure the relative occupancy of individual mRNA transcripts in translating ribosomes in the Olig2-positive tumor cell population in a genetically engineered mouse model (GEM) of glioma. Global measurement of paired ribosome-bound and total cellular mRNA populations from tumor cells in vivo identified a broad distribution of relative ribosome occupancies amongst mRNA species that was highly reproducible across biological samples. Comparison of the translation state of glioma cells to non-transformed oligodendrocyte progenitor cells in normal brain identified global alteration of translation in tumor, and specifically of genes involved in cell division and synthetic metabolism. Furthermore, investigation of alteration in steady state translational efficiencies upo