In this video, we're going to talk about the 3rd and final step of translation, which is the termination of translation. And so, of course, termination means to put something to an end. During termination, the process of translation will be coming to an end. During the termination of translation, a stop codon is going to reach the ribosome's A site and that is going to trigger a release factor protein to bind. If we take a look at our image down below, we can see that we have our growing polypeptide chain here.
And here, what we have is the next codon, but this codon, notice, is a stop codon, UGA. This stop codon is not going to be associated with a tRNA. Instead, the stop codon is going to trigger a release factor protein, this orange protein, to bind. When the release factor protein is bound, it's going to trigger a series of events. First, the polypeptide chain is going to be cleaved and released from the tRNA.
You can see that the tRNA over here is no longer bound to the polypeptide chain as it was on this side. What we end up getting is our final polypeptide chain right here at this position that is going to be released. Also, the entire translation assembly is going to come apart as well, due to this release factor. The release factor gets the release, the mRNA is released, the small and large ribosomal complexes are going to dissociate from each other. Again, the final protein chain, the polypeptide chain, is also released.
That terminates the entire process of translation. This here concludes our brief lesson on the termination of translation, and we'll be able to get some practice applying the concepts that we've talked about here and the steps of translation as we move forward in our course. So I'll see you all in our next video.