Molecular cross-talk between the transcription, translation, and nonsense-mediated decay machineries.

It is widely believed that translation occurs only in the cytoplasm of eukaryotes, but recent results suggest some takes place in nuclei, coupled to transcription. Support for this heterodoxy comes from studies of the nonsense-mediated decay (NMD) pathway; this pathway probably uses ribosomes to proofread messenger RNAs. We find components of the machineries involved in transcription, translation and NMD colocalise, interact and copurify, and that interactions between them are probably mediated by the C-terminal domain of the catalytic subunit of RNA polymerase II. These results are simply explained if the NMD machinery uses nuclear ribosomes to translate - and so proofread - newly made transcripts; then, faulty transcripts and any truncated peptides produced by nuclear translation would be degraded.