When the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 turned our world upside down, mRNA vaccines against COVID-19 brought a breakthrough. Their success established modified mRNA as a powerful foundation for vaccines and opened the way for new mRNA-based technologies, with potential applications ranging from vaccines against other infectious diseases to cancer immunotherapy.

Researchers led by Marina Rodnina and Panagiotis Poulis from the Max Planck Institute for Multidisciplinary Sciences (Göttingen, Germany) have now uncovered an important aspect of how such modified mRNAs are translated into proteins. In their study published in Nature Communications, they show why ribosomes can occasionally shift into the wrong reading frame when translating modified mRNA and how these errors can be largely avoided through mRNA sequence design.