A Tailor-Made Protein Synthesis Program Drives Erythroid Development and Disease

Erythropoiesis constitutes the largest demand on the hematopoietic system due to its extraordinary production on a daily basis.  The erythroid proteome requires an integration of multiple external cues to coordinate programs of differentiation as well as maintenance of erythroid precursors. The biomedical relevance of this critical process is underscored by recent findings showing impaired ribosome function in an entire class of clinical disorders with severe impairments in erythroid differentiation, known as ribosomopathies, which remain poorly understood. One of the main signaling pathways controlling post-transcriptional gene expression during erythropoiesis is the mTOR pathway. mTOR activation downstream of SCF/Epo in erythroid progenitors controls the activity of the major cap-binding protein eIF4E. However, the functional role of eIF4E during erythropoiesis and protein synthesis control in this cell type remains unexplored. Here we show that eIF4E activity, through mTOR-dependent phosphorylation of its inhibitory protein 4EBP1, unexpectedly undergoes a dynamic switch between early erythroid precursor populations and during terminal erythrocyte maturation, where eIF4E becomes progressively silenced. Employing a unique eIF4E transgenic mouse model, we strikingly show that overexpression of eIF4E in the bone marrow compartment results in an early accumulation of erythrocyte precursors and a block in erythrocyte differentiation. Surprisingly, this new role of eIF4E in erythropoiesis is independent from control of global protein synthesis but instead may promote a specialized program of translation control that is customized for erythroid cell function. Employing state of the art unbiased proteomics, our work is uncovering distinct networks of proteins, whose expression levels are controlled by eIF4E dosage during specific phases of erythrocyte maturation.  Together, our research highlights a novel molecular program linking exquisite regulation of eIF4E activity to specialized translational control underlying erythroid development, providing unprecedented insight into the etiology of erythroid dysfunction in ribosomopathies.