Friday, September 30, 2011

The Zipper Model of Translational Control: A Small Upstream ORF Is the Switch that Controls Structural Remodeling of an mRNA Leader

This is an older paper; it is from 2003. However, I have never read it until now. Many current papers state that no one has found a mammalian riboswitch. I knew of one paper in 2009 (previously posted) that did report that they had found a mammalian riboswitch, and to my knowledge this was the only published report of one. Yet, upon further investigation, I found Dr. Maria Hatzoglou web site, where she claimed that she had found the first mammalian riboswitch. I had then followed the citation, and this was the paper. I am very surprised, given the paper's age, that people still claim that there are no endogenous mammalian riboswitches.
This reported riboswitch again does not act like the typical reported prokaryotic switch. In this switch, translation is regulated by what the author calls a zipper model. Breifly, transcribed mRNA is bicistronic. Translation of the upstream gene, causes a conformational change which allows a trans-acting factor to bind and induce translation of the downstream gene.

No comments:

Post a Comment