Do plants drive translation reinitiation to dodge nonsense-mediated decay?

In eukaryotes, a large proportion of mRNAs contains one or multiple upstream ORFs (uORFs) and their translation can cause a drastic reduction in main ORF translation. Furthermore, reinitiation-non-permissive uORFs can trigger degradation of their mRNAs via nonsense-mediated mRNA decay (NMD)-a process well documented in mammals. Cymerman et al. (2023) investigated whether the NMD pathway can target mRNAs with long and structured uORFs in Arabidopsis. They demonstrate that, in contrast to the observations in mammalian cells, these reinitiation-non-permissive uORFs do not trigger mRNA degradation by NMD.