Abstract
Prokaryotic organisms often react instantly to environmental variations to ensure their survival. They can achieve this by rapidly and specifically modulating translation, the critical step of protein synthesis. The translation machinery responds to an array of cis-acting elements, located on the RNA transcript, which dictate the fate of mRNAs. These cis-encoded elements, such as RNA structures or sequence motifs, interact with a variety of regulators, among them small regulatory RNAs. These small regulatory RNAs (sRNAs) are especially effective at modulating translation initiation through their interaction with cis-encoded mRNA elements. Here, through selected examples of canonical and non-canonical regulatory events, we demonstrate the intimate connection between mRNA cis-encoded features and sRNA-dependent translation regulation. We also address how sRNA-based mechanistic studies can drive the discovery of new roles for cis-elements. Finally, we briefly overview the challenges of using translation regulation by synthetic regulators as a tool.
Highlights
Prokaryotic organisms depend on protein synthesis to grow and adjust to their surroundings
Most ribosomal RNAs are encoded in polycistronic transcripts that must be precisely processed through multistep pathways to be functional (Deutscher, 2009)
RNA-binding proteins (RBPs) are known to interact with various cis-elements to alter the secondary structure of an mRNA (Figure 1H) or to directly interfere with translation initiation (Figure 1I)
Summary
Prokaryotic organisms depend on protein synthesis to grow and adjust to their surroundings. RNA-binding proteins (RBPs) are known to interact with various cis-elements to alter the secondary structure of an mRNA (Figure 1H) or to directly interfere with translation initiation (Figure 1I) This short review will focus on ribonucleic trans-acting regulators, small regulatory RNAs (sRNAs), interacting with mRNA ciselements to modulate their translation. SRNAs base-pair to their target mRNAs to repress or increase protein synthesis through various mechanisms of action, most of which have been extensively reviewed elsewhere (Gottesman and Storz, 2011; Papenfort and Vanderpool, 2015; Carrier et al, 2018; Dutta and Srivastava, 2018) These regulatory events result in modulation of mRNA stability and/or of translation efficiency. Additional regulatory mechanisms are periodically brought up to light, creating a more accurate portrait of sRNA complexity
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