Nasif S Contu L Mühlemann O 2018 Nonsense-mediated mRNA decay (NMD) has traditionally been described as a quality control system that rids cells of aberrant mRNAs with crippled protein coding potential. However, transcriptome-wide profiling of NMD deficient cells identified a plethora of seemingly intact mRNAs coding for functional proteins as NMD targets. This led to the view that NMD constitutes an additional post-transcriptional layer of gene expression control involved in the regulation of many different biological pathways. Here, we review our current knowledge about the role of NMD in embryonic development and tissue-specific cell differentiation. We further summarize how NMD contributes to balancing of the integrated stress response and to cellular homeostasis of splicing regulators and NMD factors through auto-regulatory feedback loops. In addition, we discuss recent evidence that suggests a role for NMD as an innate immune response against several viruses. Altogether, NMD appears to play an important role in a broad spectrum of biological pathways, many of which still remain to be discovered. application/pdf https://sonar.ch/global/documents/156926 eng info:eu-repo/semantics/altIdentifier/doi/10.1016/j.semcdb.2017.08.053 info:eu-repo/semantics/altIdentifier/pmid/28866327 info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess Seminars in cell & developmental biology. - 2018 NMD Neuronal differentiation Posttranscriptional gene regulation RNA turnover SMG1 SMG5 SMG6 SMG7 Spermatogenesis Stress response UPF1 UPF2 UPF3A UPF3B Unfolded protein response mRNA surveillance Animals Cell Differentiation Embryonic Development Gene Expression Regulation Homeostasis Humans Immunity, Innate Nonsense Mediated mRNA Decay Quality Control RNA, Messenger Beyond quality control: The role of nonsense-mediated mRNA decay (NMD) in regulating gene expression. http://purl.org/coar/resource_type/c_6501