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. 2011 Mar 10;7(3):e1002006. doi: 10.1371/journal.ppat.1002006

Figure 4. Integrating the S. aureus sRNAs into gene regulation cascades.

Figure 4

The “agr-RNAIII” auto-activation circuit is indicated with the two feed-forward loops involving RNAIII. When reaching optimal density, the autoinducing peptide (AIP) activates the agr autocatalytic circuit, leading to RNAIII transcription. RNAIII represses the expression of rot, which activates spa transcription and represses that of hla. In the meantime, RNAIII also activates hla mRNA translation and represses spa mRNA translation. The plain and broken lines indicate the direct or indirect gene activations, respectively. The red lines indicate the down-regulations mediated by the various RNAs. The black question marks above the “see-sawing” triangles point to the unknown triggering factors. The transcriptional regulatory proteins are in blue. The complexity of this scheme will certainly increase as we learn more on the sRNA functions.