Bacterial riboswitches

Abstract

This wikipedia entry provides an extensive description of natural and engineered riboswitches. Most known riboswitches have been found in bacteria. This webpage provides a link to an electronic thesis file describing a riboswitch that responds to the herbicide atrazine. This web article discusses synthetic riboswitches. These are tools that researchers can use to control bacterial metabolism. The development of synthetic riboswitches requires the ability to screen aptamers for the ability to bind molecules of interest. The use of the method to develop a riboswitch for the natural product theophylline is described. This page contains an extensive list of references related to ribozymes and riboswitches. On and off riboswitches were deployed in tandem to produce regulation that mimics an electronic band-pass filter. This web article describes modeling for the effective design of synthetic riboswitches. This page provides a good overview of riboswitches and has useful graphics. This blog page provides a discussion of a paper and a good overview of riboswitches. This page contains an extensive list of references on mostly natural riboswitches. This page contains a patent on riboswitches. As described, riboswitches can be used to make biosensors, engineer metabolism and carry out gene therapy. A ribozyme has been explored to block bacterial resistance to beta-lactam antibiotics. This Facebook page describes ribozymes that recognize purine nucleotides. There are links to Protein Databank files to these ribozymes. This database allows one to screen sequences for potential function as ribozymes. This description of bacterial riboswitches is from the Microbe blog. Links to additional information are provided. This page provides a link to a thesis describing novel functions of riboswitches. With widespread genome sequencing, more types of riboswitches are being identified in bacteria. This link is to a lecture on riboswitches.