A novel mechanism of 5’ UTR structure in promoting prokaryotic translational initiation

Gene expression involves consecutive and delicate regulation of transcription and translation. One of the mechanisms that controls the initiation of translation is the structure of the 5’ untranslated region (5’ UTR) of mRNA. In prokaryotes, the initiation process depends on the ribosome binding site (RBS), which is a complementary sequence to the ribosomal RNA and provides an anchor of ribosome assembly. Current research has demonstrated that releasing the RBS from an aptamer or hairpin structure could resume translation.