uORFs overlapping CDS mediate the highest repressive potential.

<p>During the progression of the life cycle stages, uORFs are cut out or can appear again in the transcriptome due to alternative trans-splicing and might affect translation efficiency depending on their position in 5’ UTR. The example of transition from PCF to EMF is most promising to study the repressive potential of uORFs, since EMF presents the highest absolute level of transcripts and relatively the largest amount of uORF-containing transcripts. The figure presents inter stage changes from PCF to EMF of their respective normalized protein levels (y-axis) and uORF-containing mRNA reads if the respective gene (x-axis). Panels <b>A</b>, <b>B</b>, <b>C</b> and <b>D</b> include transcripts, which contain uORFs with different uORF-to-CDS distance windows. Most scatters are located in the bottom right quadrant, meaning that during the progression from PCF to EMF uORFs are overweighted in the transcriptome and repress translation dose dependently. Red scatters indicate uORFs that are consecutively underrepresented in MCF and release translation repression again (see <a href="http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0201461#pone.0201461.g010" target="_blank">Fig 10</a>). The regression lines slope can be employed as a measure, how effective overweighting a uORF correlates to protein output control. (<b>A</b>) In general, overlapping uORFs score the highest repression efficiency. (<b>B</b>, <b>C</b>, <b>D</b>) The uORF’s repressive potential decreases with increasing uORF to CDS distance.