Question

Can someone please compare and contrast sRNA regulators that act in trans and riboswitches?

Answer 1

I) Theaction mechanisms of cis-encoded and trans-encoded sRNAs For cis-encoded sRNA-target mRNA interactions, there exists a perfect base pairing region and these genes overlap but are localized on different strands. Here the interaction GadY:gadX was provided to demonstrate such interaction, in which the blue color represents sRNA and the red color stands for the target mRNA. However, for trans-encoded sRNA-target mRNA interactions, there exists an imperfect base pairing region. These genes are separate from each other and therefore there is no overlap between them.

II)Riboswitches are an important class of regulatory RNA.They are cis-regulatory structured RNA elements in the untranslated regions of mRNAs, capable of regulating downstream gene expression through small molecule ligand-induced conformational switching.

sRNAs and riboswitches that have focused on one regulatory RNA class and mainly have been addressed to the synthetic biology field (1–6).