Eyes on translation

Translation is a fundamental biological process by which ribosomes decode genetic information into proteins. The regulation of this process plays a key role in tuning protein levels, allowing cells to respond rapidly to changes in the environment and to synthesize proteins with precise timing and at specific subcellular locations. Despite detailed biochemical and structural insight into the mechanism of protein synthesis, translational dynamics and localization in a cellular context are less well understood. Here, we summarize recent efforts to quantify and visualize translation, focusing on four publications (Morisaki et al., 2016; Wang et al., 2016; Wu et al., 2016; Yan et al., 2016) describing novel approaches to imaging in real time the synthesis of nascent peptides from individual mRNAs in living cells.