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. Author manuscript; available in PMC: 2010 Dec 21.
Published in final edited form as: Cold Spring Harb Symp Quant Biol. 2008 Nov 6;73:183–193. doi: 10.1101/sqb.2008.73.027

Figure 4.

Figure 4

Key themes from studies of miRNAs in ES cells. (A) miRNA genes are regulated in a manner similar to that of protein-coding genes. Key transcription factors cooccupy the promoters of active miRNAs and, along with Pc proteins, cooccupy the promoters of silent miRNAs. (Colored ovals) Proteins; (purple hexagons) miRNA genes. A line from a protein to a gene indicates direct regulation of the gene by the protein. (B) miRNAs can participate in an incoherent feedforward loop with key transcription factors to modulate the level of target gene expression. Key transcription factors bind and activate an miRNA gene along with another target gene that specifies an mRNA; the miRNA represses by reducing translation or stability of the mRNA. (Colored ovals) Proteins; (orange rectangle) protein-coding gene; (black squiggly line) its mRNA; (purple hexagon) miRNA gene; (squiggly lines) resulting transcripts. Regulation is depicted by arrows and t bars.