Genetic information is translated into proteins by the ribosome. Structural studies of the ribosome and of its complexes with factors and inhibitors have provided invaluable information on the mechanism of protein synthesis. Ribosome inhibitors are among the most successful antimicrobial drugs and constitute more than half of all medicines used to treat infections. However, bacterial infections are becoming increasingly difficult to treat because the microbes have developed resistance to the most effective antibiotics, creating a major public health care threat. This has spurred a renewed interest in structure-function studies of protein synthesis inhibitors, and in few cases, compounds have been developed into potent therapeutic agents against drug-resistant pathogens. In this review, we describe the modes of action of many ribosome-targeting antibiotics, highlight the major resistance mechanisms developed by pathogenic bacteria, and discuss recent advances in structure-assisted design of new molecules.

High-resolution crystal structures of Thermus thermophilus ribosomes reveal previously unseen modifications of rRNA and their contacts with mRNA and tRNAs or the protein pY. We report crystal structures of the Thermus thermophilus ribosome at 2.3- to 2.5-Å resolution, which have enabled modeling of rRNA modifications. The structures reveal contacts of modified nucleotides with mRNA and tRNAs or protein pY, and contacts within the ribosome interior stabilizing the functional fold of rRNA. Our work provides a resource to explore the roles of rRNA modifications and yields a more comprehensive atomic model of a bacterial ribosome.

High-resolution structures of the 70S ribosome from Thermus thermophilus reveal a network of ordered waters in the peptidyl transferase center that suggests a mechanism for proton movement and formation and breakdown of the tetrahedral intermediate. During peptide-bond formation on the ribosome, the α-amine of an aminoacyl-tRNA attacks the ester carbonyl carbon of a peptidyl-tRNA to yield a peptide lengthened by one amino acid. Although the ribosome's contribution to catalysis is predominantly entropic, the lack of high-resolution structural data for the complete active site in complex with full-length ligands has made it difficult to assess how the ribosome might influence the pathway of the reaction. Here, we present crystal structures of preattack and postcatalysis complexes of the Thermus thermophilus 70S ribosome at ~2.6-Å resolution. These structures reveal a network of hydrogen bonds along which proton transfer could take place to ensure the concerted, rate-limiting formation of a tetrahedral intermediate. We propose that, unlike earlier models, the ribosome and the A-site tRNA facilitate the deprotonation of the nucleophile through the activation of a water molecule.

Chemical modifications of RNAs have long been established as key modulators of nonprotein-coding RNA structure and function in cells. There is a growing appreciation that messenger RNA (mRNA) sequences responsible for directing protein synthesis can also be posttranscriptionally modified. The enzymatic incorporation of mRNA modifications has many potential outcomes, including changing mRNA stability, protein recruitment, and translation. We tested how one of the most common modifications present in mRNA coding regions, pseudouridine (Ψ), impacts protein synthesis using a fully reconstituted bacterial translation system and human cells. Our work reveals that replacing a single uridine nucleotide with Ψ in an mRNA codon impedes amino acid addition and EF-Tu GTPase activation. A crystal structure of the Thermus thermophilus 70S ribosome with a tRNA ^Phe bound to a ΨUU codon in the A site supports these findings. We also find that the presence of Ψ can promote the low-level synthesis of multiple peptide products from a single mRNA sequence in the reconstituted translation system as well as human cells, and increases the rate of near-cognate Val-tRNA ^Val reacting on a ΨUU codon. The vast majority of Ψ moieties in mRNAs are found in coding regions, and our study suggests that one consequence of the ribosome encountering Ψ can be to modestly alter both translation speed and mRNA decoding.