Steinert, Hannah ; Sochor, Florian ; Wacker, Anna ; Buck, Janina ; Helmling, Christina ; Hiller, Fabian ; Keyhani, Sara ; Noeske, Jonas ; Grimm, Steffen Kaspar ; Rudolph, Martin M. ; Keller, Heiko ; Mooney, Rachel Anne ; Landick, Robert ; Suess, Beatrix ; Fürtig, Boris ; Wöhnert, Jens ; Schwalbe, Harald (2017)
Pausing guides RNA folding to populate transiently stable RNA structures for riboswitch-based transcription regulation.
In: eLife, 6
Article, Bibliographie

Abstract

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 xpt-pbuX riboswitch from Bacillus subtilis, 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.

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