This gene encodes a member of the EIF4EBP family, which consists of proteins that bind to eukaryotic translation initiation factor 4E and regulate its assembly into EIF4F, the multi-subunit translation initiation factor that recognizes the mRNA cap structure. Read-through transcription from the neighboring upstream gene (MASK or ANKHD1) generates a transcript (MASK-BP3) that encodes a protein comprised of the MASK protein sequence for the majority of the protein and a different C-terminus due to an alternate reading frame for the EIF4EBP3 segments. [provided by RefSeq, Oct 2010].