Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Steinert, Hannah
• Sochor, Florian
• Wacker, Anna
• Buck, Janina
• Helmling, Christina
• Hiller, Fabian
• Keyhani, Sara
• Noeske, Jonas
• Grimm, Steffen
• Rudolph, Martin M
• Keller, Heiko
• Mooney, Rachel Anne
• Landick, Robert
• Suess, Beatrix
• Fürtig, Boris
• Wöhnert, Jens
• Schwalbe, Harald

Titel

Pausing guides RNA folding to populate transiently stable RNA structures for riboswitch-based transcription regulation

Ist Teil von

• eLife, 2017-05, Vol.6

Ort / Verlag

England: eLife Science Publications, Ltd

Erscheinungsjahr

2017

Quelle

Electronic Journals Library

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• In bacteria, the regulation of gene expression by cis-acting transcriptional riboswitches located in the 5'-untranslated regions of messenger RNA requires the temporal synchronization of RNA synthesis and ligand binding-dependent conformational refolding. Ligand binding to the aptamer domain of the riboswitch induces premature termination of the mRNA synthesis of ligand-associated genes due to the coupled formation of 3'-structural elements acting as terminators. To date, there has been no high resolution structural description of the concerted process of synthesis and ligand-induced restructuring of the regulatory RNA element. Here, we show that for the guanine-sensing riboswitch from , the conformation of the full-length transcripts is static: it exclusively populates the functional off-state but cannot switch to the on-state, regardless of the presence or absence of ligand. We show that only the combined matching of transcription rates and ligand binding enables transcription intermediates to undergo ligand-dependent conformational refolding.