The method is currently being developed and was applied to investigate translation dynamics in live yeast cells and is extending, rather than simply combining, the capabilities of the previous techniques. The only other transcriptome-wide method for mapping ribosome positions over mRNA with nucleotide precision is ribosome (translation) profiling. However, it captures positions of only elongating ribosomes, and most dynamic and functionally important intermediates of translation at the initiation stage are not detected.
TCP-seq was designed to specifically target these blind spots. It can essentially provide the same level of details for elongation phase as ribosome (translation) profiling, but also includes recording of initiation, termination and recycling intermediates (and basically any other possible translation complexes as long as the ribosome or its subunits are contacting and protecting the mRNA) of protein synthesis that previously remained out of the reach. Therefore, TCP-seq provides a single approach for a complete insight into the translation process of a biological sample. This particular aspect of the method can be expected to be developed further as the dynamics of ribosomal scanning on mRNA during translation initiation is generally unknown for the most of life. Current dataset containing TCP-seq data for translation initiation is available for yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae, and likely to be extended for other organisms in the future.