{"doi":"10.1038/s41586-024-07041-8","title":"A new family of bacterial ribosome hibernation factors","abstract":"Abstract To conserve energy during starvation and stress, many organisms use hibernation factor proteins to inhibit protein synthesis and protect their ribosomes from damage 1,2 . In bacteria, two families of hibernation factors have been described, but the low conservation of these proteins and the huge diversity of species, habitats and environmental stressors have confounded their discovery 3–6 . Here, by combining cryogenic electron microscopy, genetics and biochemistry, we identify Balon, a new hibernation factor in the cold-adapted bacterium Psychrobacter urativorans . We show that Balon is a distant homologue of the archaeo-eukaryotic translation factor aeRF1 and is found in 20% of representative bacteria. During cold shock or stationary phase, Balon occupies the ribosomal A site in both vacant and actively translating ribosomes in complex with EF-Tu, highlighting an unexpected role for EF-Tu in the cellular stress response. Unlike typical A-site substrates, Balon binds to ribosomes in an mRNA-independent manner, initiating a new mode of ribosome hibernation that can commence while ribosomes are still engaged in protein synthesis. Our work suggests that Balon–EF-Tu-regulated ribosome hibernation is a ubiquitous bacterial stress-response mechanism, and we demonstrate that putative Balon homologues in Mycobacteria bind to ribosomes in a similar fashion. This finding calls for a revision of the current model of ribosome hibernation inferred from common model organisms and holds numerous implications for how we understand and study ribosome hibernation.","journal":"Nature","year":2024,"id":418312,"datarank":0.6010999777848708,"base_score":4.007333185232471,"endowment":4.007333185232471,"self_citation_contribution":0.6010999777848708,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.6010999777848708,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":54,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9473,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2024-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":755115,"name":"Mariia Yu. Rybak","orcid":"0000-0002-0478-0222","position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1205815,"name":"Chinenye L. Ekemezie","orcid":"0000-0001-6889-7123","position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1178848,"name":"Rudi Sullivan","orcid":null,"position":3,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1205816,"name":"Charlotte R. Brown","orcid":"0000-0002-0869-441X","position":4,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1206641,"name":"C. Dingwall","orcid":null,"position":5,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":298032,"name":"Arnaud Baslé","orcid":"0000-0002-4899-3086","position":6,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1166276,"name":"Claudia Schneider","orcid":"0000-0001-5597-2489","position":7,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1205817,"name":"James P. R. Connolly","orcid":"0000-0002-0394-3413","position":8,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1202316,"name":"James N. Blaza","orcid":"0000-0001-5420-2116","position":9,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":238122,"name":"Bálint Csörgő","orcid":"0000-0003-0397-6845","position":10,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":946476,"name":"Patrick J. Moynihan","orcid":"0000-0003-4182-6223","position":11,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":826386,"name":"Matthieu G. Gagnon","orcid":"0000-0003-4516-604X","position":12,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":17828,"name":"Chris H. Hill","orcid":"0000-0001-7037-0611","position":13,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":17942,"name":"Sergey Melnikov","orcid":"0000-0002-7525-9039","position":14,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1205814,"name":"Karla Helena-Bueno","orcid":"0000-0003-1852-2408","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":75,"raw_metadata":{"citation_network_status":"fetched"},"created_at":"2026-07-19T01:57:02.483590Z","pmid":"38355796","pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}