Week In Science

Tim Lambert posted an entertaining blog entry at Intelligently Sequenced titled Trp Attenuation: A Clever Way to Regulate. It described the regulation of the synthesis of tryptophan in prokaryotic organisms.

Phylogenetic conservation of RNA secondary and tertiary structure in the trpEDCFBA operon leader transcript in Bacillus, is authored by Janell E. Schaak, Paul Babitzke, and Philip C. Bevilacqua, (RNA 2003 9: 1502-1515). The paper notes that the expression of the tryptophan biosynthetic trpEDCFBA operon in Bacillus subtilis is regulated through transcription attenuation by means of the TRAP protein-the trp RNA-binding attenuation protein. The paper contains a visual model of the transcription attenuation mechanism of the B. subtilis trpEDCFBA operon.